2 weeks Ago By John Bird
In an outburst of bad manners I suddenly left the select committee on homelessness and rough sleeping; prematurely, possibly painting me as a brat. I called the meeting a “farce”, hard words for a group of MPs and the chair of the committee to take. But without missing a beat the committee carried on and even thanked me for my contribution.
I am not so sure if there is a precedent for someone storming out of a select committee evidence-gathering exercise. I was one of four people giving evidence on the increasing emergency of homelessness, and the more pressing presence of rough sleepers on our streets. I made the point that we are always talking about an emergency because we only deal with the emergency as an emergency.
Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter That in fact if we don’t likewise concentrate on ‘turning the tap off’, preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place, then we will always be handling ‘the emergency’. I quoted the Churchill/Attlee coalition government of 1940, that in the midst of fighting Germany – and doing very badly – William Beveridge was dug out of retirement to write the report that led to the creation of the postwar welfare state . So in the thick of an emergency a future ending of the emergency was planned for.
A better handling of the conditions of poverty that needed to be addressed. And prevention was foremost in the minds of those formulating later governmental policy. Yet the committee to me seemed fixated entirely on the moment, on the crisis, on the poor services that are being offered.
In my opinion – having dealt with six governments since we created Big Issue – they were all saying the same thing. Dealing exclusively with the crisis as a crisis was ensuring the crisis would continue. That prevention and cure were not getting a look in.
That most MPs, peers and governments and government departments charged with dealing with poverty were stuck on dealing with the emergency. It was very rude of me to leave before the end of the meeting and I apologised to the committee chair later. It was pure and unadulterated frustration that drove me to get up and go and describe the evidence-giving as a farce.
To not see any new thinking around ending the inheritance of poverty – the background for most homelessness and rough sleeping – led me to protest and leave early. Big Issue founder calls for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention ahead of the general election What are the causes of homelessness? Homelessness facts and statistics: The numbers you need to know in 2024 But when 80% of all poverty money goes on emergency, and little on prevention and cure, then we are always going to see poverty-related homelessness figure on our streets and in our council offices. Always see the breaking of people’s lives, those who are nearly always the lowest paid, who cannot survive the inflation and rent hikes that drive them into eviction and temporary local authority accommodation.
Because government policy scatters and does not centralise poverty policy and programmes, you get a scattergun effect. There’s no one really in charge of turning the tap off. No one looking into the details of why people go from inherited poverty to lives of poverty and families in poverty.
How they follow a well-trodden path that their parents, who inherited poverty, also trod. I am convinced that if we could have a central body within government that dealt with poverty, that brought all efforts together, then we could begin to challenge ‘the inheritance of poverty’. That we have to do all we can to deal with the emergency of homelessness and rough sleeping, but we have also to start reducing the number of people falling into it.
Yet the billion upon billion spent on people in poverty only maintains them in poverty; brings them relief, not exit, or an earlier prevention. And most members of parliament and their governments have only dealt with trying to give the poor a bit more; not with ending their poverty. All the energy goes into trying to make the poor a bit more comfortable whilst they remain in poverty.
Yet with 11 million economically inactive people in the UK, we are not addressing how to turn the tap off and build a high wage economy. How we end the inheritance of poverty, meaning that poverty is the single biggest government spend, will take thoughtfulness and science; it will take clever thinking. As of yet we only see smatterings of it.
Unless we accept that we are spending money on the effect and not on finding ways of preventing then we will have a more troubled society. Fifty per cent of people who suffer from cardiac-related illnesses, according to the British Medical Association, suffer from food poverty . Food poverty causes the biggest hit on the NHS, on our schools and on many governmental budgets.
I was rude in leaving the select committee. But when are we going to see the government converge their energies, and the public’s money, towards ending the creation of poverty from one generation to the next? When are we going to wake up to the incredible cost of poverty, the incredible waste of human resources? Resources have to be shifted to those early days, to those who inherit poverty through the luck of the draw. Unfortunately it is largely those that have inherited stability and comfort who are making the decisions for the luckless.
It is those that have won the lottery of birth that decide how we spend our money, on providing another band-aid to put over the sore of poverty, rather than end its domination over so many lives. John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here .
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