Covid-19: Children

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I declare my interests as in the register around homelessness, because I would like to bring us to an unsavoury report that I read this morning from the National Residential Landlords Association which says that about 800,000 families in tenancies are behind in their rent. This figure has increased by 82% since we entered the Covid-19 crisis.

Imagine what is going to happen to hundreds of thousands of children if we allow them to slip into homelessness. What will that do to our schools and the problems that are thrown up? These are the kind of figures that are hidden in homelessness. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. At the Big Issue, I worked with 7,000 to 9,000 people and about 12,000 children a year who had gone through homelessness. There are about 120,000 children who live in temporary accommodation and another 90,000 who are living the life of a sofa surfer. Imagine the damage that does to the lives of our children. What are we going to do about that? What are we going to do to stop something happening that has never happened before? Those children were in some ways socially prepared for the laws of unintended consequences because their parents had fallen out of being able to provide for the family. What we have now is hundreds of thousands of families who are not socially prepared. They are not the people who sell the Big Issue; they are the people who read it. We have got this coming down the line.

I am sorry: every time I stand up in this House, I nearly always return to the same problem. When will the Government produce a road map to show that they will make sure that people will not be allowed to slip into homelessness, that children will not be damaged and that the hundreds of thousands will be kept in their homes, looked after in their homes, given social security and have their rent or mortgage paid if they do the right thing? If they slip into homelessness, the costs go up by two or three times. It is much cheaper to keep somebody in their home than to push them into the social treacle of homelessness.

How do we stop hundreds of thousands of children slipping into homelessness, getting depressed, being broken for maybe two generations and taking for ever to get out of it? What we do is convince the Government and the Treasury that it is much cheaper to mend the problem and to put a fence at the top of the hill and not an ambulance at the bottom—because that is what in some ways they are preparing for. They will shift large amounts of money into local authorities so that we can have more and more temporary accommodation. What does temporary accommodation do to a child’s mind? All the questions of education will go out of the window.

I am here once again to remind the Government: please, do this for our children. Stop our children slipping into homelessness and becoming the flotsam and jetsam that whoever is running the Big Issue in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time will have to take on.