John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has called for an overhaul in education funding during a key House of Lords debate on homelessness.
Lord Bird of Notting Hill, who was appointed to the House of Lords as a non-party crossbench peer in October 2015, said increasing government spending on early-stage intervention for young people was a necessity to defeat rising levels of homelessness and poverty in Britain.
“In Britain today we fail 30 per cent of our children in school – and those 30 per cent of our children become 70 to 80 per cent of our prison population, and become 60, 70 or 80 per cent of the people on social security,” he said during Wednesday’s debate (September 7, pictured left).
“You get a situation where families are broken, where our children are not given places of safety, where social security is not used as a place of security, and so what happens is you produce another generation of people who become homeless.
“Lord Cashman says that we could all be homeless – we could be – but the chances are that, if you were failed at school, if your parents are on social security, if you live in a council flat on social security, you are more likely not to go to university and you will in fact have to rely on the university of the streets or the university of the social security office.