Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am not here to congratulate the Government, nor to commiserate with the Opposition. I am here to talk about what the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, has called for, which is: not more of the same. I think that is what he asked for.

I came into the House of Lords—I am sorry that I keep repeating this—to get rid of poverty, not to make the poor more comfortable, which every Administration since the Second World War has been trying to do. As a person who comes from that class, I know darn well that if you spend all your efforts on trying to make the poor comfortable then you will destroy their future, because there is no such thing as a future if you are stuck in poverty.

I was astonished to hear from the Minister that poverty costs £40 billion. I am astonished because of the fact that roughly half of the budgets for our NHS hospitals—this is according to the doctors I have spoken to—are spent on trying to keep the poorest among us as healthy as possible. Look at the fact that 50% of people who suffer from cardiac arrests and cardiac illnesses are those who have food poverty in their background. If you look at the prison system, it is almost a poverty system. All right, we have some middle-class and upper-class people; we have had the occasional posh person join the prison estate, but it is mainly a gateway for people to go into a closed society who themselves have inherited poverty. What I do not understand about this Government, and did not understand about the previous one or the one before, and the one before them, is that they never stop and say, as the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, is asking us to do, that it does not work.

Some years ago, I developed something called the PEC system. I am very proud of it, because it has been used by Governments elsewhere and by local authorities. I have spoken about it in the House. PEC stands for “prevention, emergency, cure”. Why is it that all Governments have a number of initiatives and projects around prevention and cure that never go mainstream? Why is it that 80% of the money that this Government are spending directly on poverty is spent in the emergency of poverty: in holding the hands of the poorest among us? When are we going to wake up to the fact that it is a great risk to democracy? We are going to see it coming down the line. Reform is riddled with poverty. The people who are getting on the boats coming over here are riddled with poverty. Yet Government after Government, department after department, Minister after Minister, still keep this shambolic governmental system, with a Treasury that is hidden from sight on most occasions and does not get down into the dirt and look at the damage done by poverty.

I will end there, but I would like to congratulate the Government on their Budget. I would love to see some real, serious intervention in this House and the other place around the idea of when we are going to dismantle poverty rather than doing these stop-gap things.