Covid-19 Update

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the Government—and I personally—are extremely interested in this area. Early findings of a study by the Coronavirus Immunology Consortium and Public Health England, which have not been peer reviewed yet, suggest that a strong cellular immune response is likely to be present in the majority of adults six months after infection. At present, there is not enough evidence to rule out people who have positive T cell responses or antibodies to Covid-19 from potentially still playing a role in transmitting the virus to others. However, further research on the level of sterilising immunity provided by natural infection should be available from the SIREN study and the Oxford healthcare workers study before the end of the year. I look forward to the results of those studies very much.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I remind that House that not so long ago the Government put their arms around the homeless and removed them from the streets. They did a highly commendable job because it was the first time that a Government had taken responsibility for rough sleepers en masse. They did not quite finish the job because it was difficult to bring them in. Can we also put our arms around the roughly 200,000 people who, according to the LGA, will fall homeless through eviction? The best thing that we can do is to keep people in their houses. It cuts the cost of poverty and it cuts the cost of homelessness. When people slip into homelessness, the costs double.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am enormously grateful to the noble Lord for his very generous comments. I commend him for his advocacy both in the instance of Covid and for his lifelong commitment to standing up for the homeless. He is right that the homeless are undoubtedly super-vulnerable to a pandemic such as Covid and that there is a finance problem for the charities which look after those who live on the streets. He is right that those who have trouble paying their rent and face eviction are in a particularly difficult position. That is why we have put in place a mortgage relief scheme, continue to support the furlough scheme and keep in mind the plight of those who struggle to pay their household bills.

Childhood Obesity

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

My noble friend is a great champion on this subject and has been an expert in it for a long period. Through the prevention Green Paper, which is due to be published this summer, we are determined to look at a range of further options to tackle obesity. We have publicly committed to taking action on infant and baby food. She will know that we are making progress on the reformulation section of the obesity strategy. However, we have further to go, and I am grateful to her for her Question on this issue.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible to consider something very clever? Rather than accepting that the poorest among us are the ones who deal with obesity, why do we not give them a Waitrose lunch and dinner and subsidise it, and stop having to pay further upline in the NHS? Why do we not start thinking globally rather than just a bit at a time?

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I thank the noble Lord for his question; I hope that we can occasionally think cleverly in government. He is absolutely right that obesity is strongly correlated with socioeconomic deprivation, and that is why chapter 2 of our plan tries to target those areas that are most affected by delivering a childhood obesity trailblazer programme, working with local authorities to address this. They have been provided with £100,000 in the first instance to try to improve the impact of the childhood obesity plan. We shall see how that goes, but I am very happy to pass on his suggestion.

The NHS

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am really pleased to be talking in this debate about the National Health Service. I started life in St Mary’s Hospital. My mother, a lovely Irish lady, said that I was the most difficult birth because instead of it taking 10 Woodbines to birth me, it took 20. I should not really be here: I should be dead, because I come from poverty. I am in the House of Lords because of poverty, to try to dismantle poverty and to prevent poverty happening.

I do not want to sound like Mark Antony at Caesar’s funeral, but talking about the National Health Service raises a number of questions for me. One is: are we talking about the National Health Service or the “I will get you back to health” service? My problem is that when I look around, I look at the big, ugly sun that sets and rises over all of us, which is poverty. According to a friend of mine who worked at St Thomas’ Hospital, 60% to 70% of the people the NHS has to deal with come from poverty. Because they come from poverty, they present their poverty in many ways and one of the big ways is in their health.

I will quote two human beings. One, John Newton, is the director of Public Health England, who makes the point that 40% of all illnesses that present in hospitals and the National Health Service are preventable and 23% of deaths need never have happened.

I have a quotation from 1944, from the MP for Rochdale, Dr Hyacinth Morgan, who said:

“The whole question of social medicine, with the questions of good milk supply, prevention of disease, good food and nutrition, good housing, good recreational facilities, prevention of mental disability in its early stages—all this has been left out of the White Paper”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/3/1944; col. 494.]


Looking at the National Health Service over the past 70 years, I would say that it is an absolutely wonderful invention that has saved many members of my family. I have yet to use it, but, when it does come along, I am sure you will give me a brilliant send-off.

The point is that, unless we find a way, instead of spending 5% of the national health budget on prevention, to move it mainstream, we will always be worshipping at the altar of the accomplished fact. We will always be dealing with health rather than the terrible reality that exists behind it, which is the fact that we live in a poverty culture; we have poverty capitalism, where the poorest among us have to resort to the kind of food that can lead only to bad health. Until we get rid of poverty capitalism, we are not really going anywhere, and we will be talking about more and more needs for the National Health Service. The National Health Service will become even bigger unless we tackle the elephant in the room, which is poverty.

Brexit: Food Standards Agency

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I do not think it is a laughing matter; it is a matter of the utmost seriousness concerning the security and safety of this country. It affects not only food safety but chemicals, medicines and aerospace. We have set out our plans for associate membership and others forms of relationship that will provide that information to our systems. Equally, information that makes a massive contribution to the safety of EU citizens is also fed back to the EU.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, is it possible that the Food Standards Agency will become so strong after Brexit that it will actually do something about the appalling poor-quality food that most poor people have to eat, which leads to our hospitals being filled up by people with all sorts of nutritional problems? Will the Food Standards Agency get behind addressing the problem of class-divided food?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord raises an important issue. However, it is important to distinguish what the Food Standards Agency is responsible for and what it is not. It is responsible for making sure that food is safe. Nutritional value is a different responsibility that accrues to the department and to Public Health England, and we have taken many significant actions, including reducing sugar content in drinks and food, to make sure that precisely the issues he is talking about are dealt with.

Emergency Hospital Admissions

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce and prevent avoidable emergency hospital admissions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord O’Shaughnessy) (Con)]

My Lords, NHS England and NHS Improvement are implementing a number of national programmes to transform NHS services so that, where clinically appropriate, a patient’s care is managed without the need for a stay in hospital. This is being achieved through services becoming better integrated across health and social care, as well as managing hospital care differently, so that more patients are treated as day patients in A&E or streamed to see a general practitioner.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. The recent report of the National Audit Office stated that nearly 25% of people who go into hospital do so in an avoidable situation, which could be sorted out in the community. This is a clear case of why we need more prevention. What extra thinking and resources will the Government bring into the community so that we do not have the ridiculous situation of such people going into hospital, where we have the problem of a shortage of nurses and all the other things that knock on?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord makes an important point. It was good to study the report and the noble Lord is right about avoidable hospital admissions. Two changes are happening. One is GP extended access, which now has 95% coverage across the country—that is, evenings, weekends and so on—as primary care. We also have interesting results coming from the new models of care programme. I highlight one that is happening in mid-Nottinghamshire. It is called PRISM and it is a virtual ward for at-risk patients which enables multidisciplinary teams to look at vulnerable people before they come to hospital. It has reduced A&E attendance for those aged over 80 by 17%, which is significant. It is precisely this kind of thing that will make the difference that we need.

Brexit: Mental Health Research Funding

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

As I said, we continue to bid for funds that we can draw down, and the Government are committed to underwriting any successful bids as part of the Horizon 2020 programme. Our intention is to continue in that programme. Obviously, if that is not the case, we will have funding available to support health research in this area, but our intention is to continue with the partnership that has proved so fruitful.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Will the Minister accept that, in spite of all the wonderful research, Britain is falling way behind at the point of need and that on the streets and among the poorest in this country, mental health support has completely disappeared?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I totally do not accept that proposition. Mental health is certainly a problem in this country. One in six adults and one in 10 children has a common mental health disorder, and those figures are pretty devastating. However, the Government have been increasing funding for mental health. It has gone up by 8.4% over the last two years, so there is funding. There are more staff in mental health trusts and we have pledged to treat 70,000 more children. Therefore, we are putting the money in and getting better results.

Healthcare: Spending

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 4th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

As I referred to in my previous answer, the Government have provided additional funding to the NHS—£10 billion more by 2020. It is also worth noting that since the 2015 election over £9 billion of additional funding has been found for social care, which of course has huge strains upon it, and that makes a big difference.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Does the noble Lord agree with Brian Ferguson, the chief economist of Public Health England, when he says that prevention is much more cost effective than other forms of intervention and that we have to push up the amount of spending on that, which is in the region of 4% to 5%? Is the Minister prepared to talk to MPs and Lords who want to push up the amount spent by this Government on prevention methodology in this country?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord is quite right: we need to move from an NHS that deals with illness to one that promotes healthcare, and preventive healthcare is a huge part of that. We are providing over £16 billion of public health funding for local authorities to do that over the period of the spending review. Of course, I shall be delighted to meet any Peers and MPs who want to talk about that further.

Health Workers: Training

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turnberg (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords—

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords—

NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Friday 26th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I know it is normal to declare an interest, but I have to declare an ignorance: I am not too hot on charitable trusts around hospitals. But I am hot on some things.

In 1991, I started a project called the Big Issue. The reason I started it was that the provision from government, and from charities, was completely and utterly lacking in one area, which I will refer to later. I support this Bill which gives trustees their head, the belief that they can make changes and the opportunity to spend money wisely. The very idea of a Minister of State overseeing charity trusts is a situation that I would want to end. I would like to use the opportunity of my maiden speech to get behind freeing up charities and encouraging them. But, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said, charities themselves need to go through some pretty thorough work. When we started the Big Issue, we ran into enormous problems with virtually all the charities that acted in and around homelessness.

I am also interested in the subject because, even though I have never used Great Ormond Street Hospital, I am from west London, where Paddington Green kids’ hospital was where we went when we harmed ourselves. Unfortunately, it is with us no more. But I was born around the back of where JM Barrie wrote “Peter Pan”—I am a Notting Hill-Bayswater boy, and the swings that the Llewelyn Davies children played on in the early part of the last century are the same swings I was playing on just after the Second World War.

I should give the House an introduction to who I am. Thank God I am in the House; I am really pleased, and I think noble Lords will become aware of that. I would like to thank my probation officer. When I was 10, my probation officer stood beside me and, instead of chastising me as a post-war statistic, encouraged me to read and to write, even though it took me many years to master those arts, and encouraged me to look upon myself as not simply an underclass boy who, at the age of 10, had already been banged up for a few things, put on probation and fined. They were silly little things for which, today, they slap a child’s hand and say, “Don’t do that”. But in the good old days after the Second World War and in the 1950s, they trod on you hard.

I would also like to thank a wonderful woman, Baroness Wootton. Baroness Wootton was a marvellous woman who, when I was 10, put me on probation; when I was 12, made me a ward of court; when I was 13, put me in a remand home; when I was 14, sent me for a short, sharp shock; when I was 15, took me from a boys’ prison and put me back into a reformatory so that I could learn to read and write. Baroness Wootton is very important to this House: in 1958, she became one of only four women who were allowed to sit in this House and broke the male domination of the House—we should be thankful for that. I would love to think that, if she were alive today, Baroness Wootton—who would be now 118—would come running over to me and give me the biggest hug of my life.

I want to pause for a moment and go back to the Big Issue. When we started the Big Issue, I was rather aggressively anti-charity because I saw a situation where there were 501 organisations in London alone working with the homeless. They supplied you with everything from auricular acupuncture to a place to wash your undies and a shoulder to cry on, but one thing they did not give poor people was the opportunity of making money. One of the reasons they did not give them the opportunity to make money is that the laws around charities meant that you could give all sorts of things but you could not give opportunity in the form of work.

I was born in the slums of post-war London, brought up a Catholic racist—I am not having a go at the Catholics. I was brought up to hate black people, Jewish people and even English people, because we were London-Irish. I was brought up with all that poison. I was sent to all sorts of institutions, I slept rough and I stole. Someone asked me how I got into the House of Lords, and I said, “By lying, cheating and stealing”, because if I had not gone through that terrible self-defeat, I would never have been able to get out and learn to read and write in a boys’ prison at the age of 16.

Then I had a period of being a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist—I would not recommend that to anybody—which lasted a considerable time. I tried becoming a working-class Tory, but that did not work very well. I tried everything. But eventually, I realised that I had got out of poverty. I had got into the middle classes, and the most exciting thing about being in the middle classes, which sounds remarkably rude, was how clean their beds were, the fact that they had clean underwear and that they were nice to each other. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be good if I could get some of the people I grew up with and who I knew and morph them into the middle class”, but how could I do that? I could not do it politically. There was no party that could get the underclass out of the grief—the long-term unemployed, the drug users and the drunks whom I knew. There was no conceivable way.

When I was 21, I had the misfortune—and the fortune—to be hiding from the police in Edinburgh of all places. I was begging, and I can tell noble Lords that it was not a very good place to beg—that is no reference at all to our Scottish colleagues. I met a very large-nosed Scotsman called Gordon Roddick, who had no money. We became friends. Then he met a young lady called Anita. They got married and they started the Body Shop. I did not see them for 20 years, but 20 years later I saw them on the telly. My son Paddy was with me and I said to him, “I know that big-nosed bugger”—excuse my French. I got hold of him and we became friends again and he said to me, “Are you one of those persons who crawls out of the woodwork when someone becomes incredibly successful?”. And I said, “Yes”. He said, “Well I know where you’re coming from”.

In 1990, Gordon Roddick was walking through New York and a very large man whom he described as looking like a wardrobe came towards him. Gordon blessed himself and thought, “This is it”. The bloke said, “Excuse me Buddy. Would you like to buy a copy of a street paper?”. Gordon said, “Yes, how much is it?” He said, “It’s $1”. Gordon said, “That’s brilliant. I’ll buy it. How does it work?” .The bloke said, “I buy it for 50 cents and sell it for a dollar”. Gordon said, “Why are you doing this?” The bloke said, “Well, I’ve been in and out of prison and I come from Brownsville”. That is where Mike Tyson comes from and you do not get out of Brownsville without being a sportsman or having a criminal record. That was how predictable the failure rate was for that particular part of New York.

The bloke said, “I’ve got a drug habit. If I go back to where I come from, I’ll be banged up again and they will throw the key away”. So Gordon said, “This is brilliant. What you’re doing is working and poisoning yourself, but you’re not harming anybody else”. The guy said, “Yes. I don’t rob old ladies to feed my habit. I’m like everyone in Manhattan who works in the finance industry. If they want some drugs, they just ring up their dealers”, which is brilliant. So Gordon came back here and tried that. He got the Body Shop Foundation to do a feasibility study, and every one of the homeless organisations said exactly the same thing: “What do you want to give money to homeless people for? They will only drink it all, shove it up their noses or stick it in their arms”. That was that.

Gordon came to me in the early part of 1991 and he said, “Why don’t you do this free paper? First of all, you have been homeless. Secondly, you’re a printer and you know about magazines and, thirdly, you are a cheeky sort of chappie and a great beggar and ponce”—which is a subdivision of begging. He said, “Also, you do not have one sentimental bone in your body for the poor”, and I do not have one sentimental bone in my body for the poor. I look upon the poor as people who should use poverty as opportunity, which it was intended for. There is nothing wrong with poverty so long as you can get out of it. You will be stronger and fitter and better. You do not want all this always stopping you and impeding you from getting out of poverty. You only have to scrape the surface and the patina of most people in Britain today and go back a few generations to see someone who burnt the candle at both ends so that they could get out of the grief, and they passed that on to their children. That is what we need to replicate and duplicate.

We started the Big Issue and we ran into all the problems. We stood up and we said, “Look, what we want to do more than anything is give people the opportunity to make their own money”—a hand-up, not a hand-out. Later on, we started a charity and we melded those together. We helped them to get ready to become capable of finding the means to help themselves. But many people could not get to self-help, so we held their hands, and we keep on holding them.

My wife is now telling me to wind up, so I should listen—I guess that must be the only reason for that sign. I will wind up. But I end on one point. The simple fact is this. We need to prevent people from falling down, but once they fall down, we have to have the means of getting them up as quickly as possible. The Big Issue has invested in 320 businesses—social businesses around Britain and charities—to prevent the next generation of Big Issue vendors and the next generation who are using drugs and falling through the net filling up our prisons and our A&E units. I thank noble Lords for their patience.

I was going to go on for another hour and a half, a bit like Ken Dodd, but I will not. Thank you and God bless you all.

[Noble Lords]

Follow that!

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I know why noble Lords are all laughing. I have to follow that. Many a bigger man than me would have found that difficult. It is a privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Bird, and I thank him on behalf of the House for his remarkable, moving, humorous and rather unusual maiden speech.

[Lord Bird]

You chose me.

[Lord Patel]

It will go down in the records of maiden speeches. I do not know what words will be used—astounding, eccentric, and I hope not to be repeated. My noble friend has educated noble Lords in words they have not heard for many a decade; they will have to go and look them up in the dictionary. My noble friend is also a truly remarkable person. Today really is a Big Issue day.

My noble friend’s personal story is, as he described, also remarkable. If I can encapsulate it in one sentence, I would say that it is poverty to purpose.

[Lord Bird]

You have stolen my line.

[Lord Patel]

Brought up in a slum, raised as an orphan, illiterate to start with and sleeping rough, my noble friend Lord Bird went to jail several times. But he has inspired millions. He is a trailblazer. He is a social entrepreneur. He has a mission to provide a hand up to thousands of people who are too often forgotten by society.

My noble friend was awarded an MBE in 1995 for services to homeless people and he is a doctor, holding an honorary doctorate from Plymouth Business School at the University of Plymouth. He also tried to stand as Mayor of London—there is a vacancy coming up. Then, as he told us, in 2010 he was asked what his guilty secret was. He said, “I am really a working-class Tory”. He also said that he would actually like to be a Liberal because they are nice people, but that that would be too much like hard work. I cannot repeat what he said about being a socialist. Noble Lords will have to look it up because the language he used cannot be repeated here.

He was also asked whether he has any ambitions, to which he replied that he would like to write a book; I hope that that is correct. The book was to be a different version, or a replacement, of Fifty Shades of Grey. I do not know how many here have read the book; it is an education in itself. Noble Lords might not be surprised to learn that the title is Why Drawing Naked Women is Good for the Soul. I have given the noble Lord a plug for his book because I am sure that the sales will now go up by millions.

I welcome my noble friend Lord Bird to this House. We look forward to many contributions from him. They are obviously going to be challenging, colourful and, dare I say it, enjoyable.

I now move on to my contribution to the NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill. Before I do so, I hope that the whole House will join in me congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, not because she is introducing this Bill but because today is her and her husband Les’s 50th wedding anniversary—I have let the secret out, Doreen, and I offer my congratulations.