The All Party Parliamentary Group coming together to make poverty history

This crescendo of a day, Wednesday May 17, when we launched our ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group’ – an APPG – did not disappoint. Even if it was un-slick, or clumsy, or seeking clarity when clarity was hard to achieve, it served its purpose well. It launched upon the world in as best a form as it could.  If people want to know what the launch of The Big Issue was like, watch the beginning and growth of this, our ‘Business Response to a Social Crisis’ APPG. If you want to know what it’s like to have an idea and then throw it out into reality and watch it prosper, clumsily and stumblingly, towards a purpose, then our coming months will be informative. Yes, our APPG, which we have launched with Labour MP Bambos Charalambous, is momentous, and potentially up there with the launch of The Big Issue. Why? Because its essential essence is about changing the stumbling and bumbling and wasteful governmental response to social crises. And to do that we ourselves must stumble and learn towards undermining the received wisdom of governments that spend billions on keeping people in poverty and permanent crisis. 

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That rarely sculpts and refines exits from poverty, but straddles the problem of poverty rather than end it. But this is not me adding my three pennies worth of ire at the current government. No, it is more that the blunt tools and the wrong departmental shape of government intervention can only produce this indifferent and lacklustre outcome. In other words whatever government was in power, using its government departments the way they are used traditionally, would lead to the clumsy job we do as a society in countering poverty. 

The reinvention of government is the soundest call we can and should make today. Governments must be made ‘businesslike’; that does not mean privatising the NHS or other chunks of governmental armoury. It means being thoughtful and careful in how you spend your money. 

It means investing in prevention and not to leave people in the stew of poverty for a day longer than need be. It means taking a sharp and candid look at what is actually happening with the monies that are paid out to close on 20 million people who receive some form of state support. Much of that goes in pension. But a decidedly large part of it is about helping people JUST about manage the life of being poor. 

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If keeping people in poverty is a cheap option to investing in getting people out of poverty, then a businesslike approach would involve looking at other costs. When 50% of the NHS budget is spent on trying to keep people in poverty as healthy as possible you can then see that not investing in ending poverty comes at a heavy price. 

The list of savings in social support and social investment in getting people out of poverty pales into insignificance when you see the true cost of poverty: a massive 40% of government income. The Big Issue was one of the first ‘business responses to social crisis’ in the UK’s social fabric. Clumsily it pointed itself at getting people on the streets out of wrongdoing. In 1991 when we launched, the thousands of homeless people sleeping rough in the centre of London were getting into trouble with the police, with the shopkeepers and the public. 

We offered a legal way that homeless people could earn their own money and stop getting into grief in the West End. We believed that if you could tackle wrongdoing in the lives of people in need you could then move them into becoming favoured and respected people in the community. Which has been on most occasions achieved. The Big Issue and its vendors are largely treasured as a useful adjunct to urban life. 

So we want to be businesslike in bringing companies, charities, government departments, MPs and peers together who want to aid the state to achieve more than simply warehousing people in poverty. We want to encourage the growth of businesses that want to bring social opportunity in their business, that aid and abet social justice through social opportunity.  

Fine words you might say. Over the coming period we have to put meat on the bones of those words so that they don’t remain simply words.  When The Big Issue started out it had little idea of where it wanted to go. It had little skills in achieving its targets. But it stumbled forward and 32 years later tries now through Parliament, and through its magazine and social investment work, to achieve greater social justice through being more useful to us all. 

We will keep you informed of our zigzags and our straights lines of development. We have an exceedingly talented bunch of people at The Big Issue. They make an old timer like me feel humble in reviewing their skills and abilities. And if we are businesslike in building an alliance between those caught in poverty, those businesses who want to punch a hole in poverty and those in government and Parliament who truly want to make poverty a thing of the past, then we will have achieved what has eluded previous generations. Watch this space. 

John Bird is the founder and editor in chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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