The government’s short-term thinking around poverty is a costly mistake

I witnessed a debate in the House of Lords in which experts – doctors and surgeons – underlined again that poverty undermines health. I did not get the chance to say my stock comment, as others had in other ways already said it, that 50% of people suffering from cardiovascular illnesses suffer from food poverty, according to the British Medical Association. 

But the minister answering the questions responded that the government was doing exactly what was needed. The problem is, poverty and health was – and remains – the big issue and whatever it is the government is doing, it is not resolving or bringing us nearer to challenging the paucity of delivery in making poverty a thing of the past. 

I did get the chance to comment on local authority finances, which are in dire need. I pointed out that local authorities having to provide an increasing amount of temporary accommodation to families and individuals thrown into homelessness is the reason that other parts of the local authority’s responsibilities are often left unprovided for. And that increasingly, because of other anomalies and the fact that the coalition government of 2010 brought in austerity, the finances of authorities had been stripped bare.

And we are still catching up, because when Gordon Brown nationalised the banks in order to save them from collapse, and nationalised the debts they owed, all the big government money drained into that particular swamp. And then we un-nationalised the banks, allowing them to leave the arbours of socialism and return to blood-red capitalism, all to the cost of the taxpayer, and the shrivelling up of local authorities’ ability to function financially. 

I made the point to the minister that with Section 21 “no-fault evictions” still law (in spite of the government saying in their 2019 manifesto they were going to get rid of them) more people were falling into homelessness. And more people were seeking local authority support and temporary accommodation. 

It’s a crying shame to see such questions as poverty and health, and poverty and homelessness, being treated in such a stop-gap and ad-hoc fashion. No sense of connected thinking, no sense of trying to find a way of ending the emergency of poverty and its distortion of all government finances and political life. Whatever is being done now is not working in this piecemeal fashion. How unhappy is the sight of grown politicians and government ministers struggling with explanations that seem unbelievably glib and lacking in analysis. 

Why not admit that things around poverty – 40% of government expenditure – are not being resolved. And that simply admitting that the policies are not working would be a great step forward. Being able to address the rot of society is put on the back burner. 

• Tories and Labour need to stop slinging mud and urgently commit to a new Ministry of Poverty
• John Bird: The evidence suggests we’re not closing in on poverty

Poverty, poverty, poverty. A roundabout, a carousel of continuing and ever-returning problems, taking more people into poverty and not preventing it or curing it but marinating people in it; allowing people in need the blandishments of social security that is far from secure, or able to get people moving away from poverty.  

In the evening, we had the last All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting on ‘business responses to social problems’. The last, because the rules have changed and now it is almost impossible for us to run an APPG under the new rules. 

But that’s not the end of it. We have decided to reformulate ourselves, and with it hopefully be more dynamic and useful in the fight against poverty. Our aim to get government to create a Ministry of Poverty Prevention is still one of our big preoccupations. That will bring together all poverty-busting efforts into one ministry.

Building a vast collection of poverty projects and thinking that gets rid of poverty. With the government’s biggest expense being poverty – yes that 40% figure – you’d have thought the silly geezers would have got around to centralising and intensifying the fight to end poverty. 

By chance I met a doctor, a GP, in parliament who has a group of GPs who are desperate to change the existing system where they administer to the sick, but don’t get involved in preventing illness. What a turn up for the books. A GP who wants to join our new coalition, which we may call our Poverty-Busting-Posse. Or something like that. 

So out of our former APPG will come our poverty posse to try and drive forward the creation of a Ministry
of Poverty Prevention. And to begin the reconstruction of parts of our stricken society that sees more and more people suffering housing shortages and increasing costs of feeding and living. 

Let’s hope that the election will throw up the chance to debate why we keep people stewing in poverty with all the big money going on keeping people poor. And that the way governments are formulated nothing will change. 

The big issue is that poverty corrodes and destroys society and belittles our best efforts. Getting a government to admit its inability to deliver on ending poverty is going to be hard. But to drive home the failure must be done. 

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

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