House of Lords Podcast: AI weapons, the future of food production, and tackling homelessness
11 May 2023
This month we speak to chairs of two new Lords committees looking into the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems and the future of the horticultural sector. Plus, Lord Bird discusses his upbringing and how he campaigns in the House of Lords for a new way to deal with the problem of poverty.
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In this episode
‘There are things that we wish we'd never invented like nuclear weapons, like landmines, but they've been invented... autonomous weapons systems are potentially threatening, but also a big challenge in terms of international agreement and regulation.’
First up, we speak to Lord Lisvane, Chair of the AI in Weapons Systems Committee, about the effect of digital technologies on defence and the ethics of using automated weapons systems.
'It’s hundreds of thousands of jobs, it’s billions in turnover. It’s a really important sector but the problem of course as a sector is because it's so wide, there's no one overarching body that says this is important.’
Then we speak to Lord Redesdale, Chair of the Horticultural Sector Committee, about the future of food production and the impact of climate change on the industry.
‘I came into the House of Lords to dismantle poverty.’
We also hear from crossbench member, Lord Bird, about his work to tackle homelessness and bring about social change.
Transcripts
Lord Lisvane
Lord Lisvane:
Hello, I'm Robert Lisvane, Lord Lisvane. I'm chair of the Special Inquiry Committee into Artificial Intelligence and Weapons Systems and the committee's one of four set up by the House. As a one-year inquiry, we have to report by the end of November.
Amy:
Lord Lisvane, you're currently chairing the new committee looking into the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems. First of all, could you tell us a little bit about your background?
Lord Lisvane:
I spent my career in the House of Commons Service and I finished as Clerk of the House. I retired in 2014 and so I've been in this House for very nearly 10 years. I'm a Crossbencher. After a career spent being rigidly politically impartial, I certainly couldn't be anything else and I have lots of other occupations and interests, but I spent a lot of time in the House. I suppose it's quite helpful because in my professional career down the other end, I should think I was involved in something like a couple of hundred select committee inquiries. So I've seen select committees in lots of different modes and lots of different subjects.
Amy:
How did you find that sort of transition from being a member of staff in the House of Commons to then being a member of the Lords?
Lord Lisvane:
It was fascinating. Very, very different. And I think one of the really important things about the relationship between the two Houses is that it's not competing, it's complimentary. And very often you find people who say, oh, the Lords does this or the House of Commons does that. But the thing is that the two Houses do recognisably similar things, but they do them in different ways.
So the complementarity, as it were, of parliamentary activity is something which is really important in providing an effective counterweight to the overmighty executive. And executives are always overmighty. So I think that's probably something I noticed immediately. In terms of the atmosphere in the House, it's very thoughtful and reflective, which you can never say really about the House of Commons. And it's extremely courteous. And the fact that so many members of the House have expertise or experience, I usually use the word experience because expertise takes a lot of effort to keep up to date. That fact means that ministers I think get a rougher ride and there's more time for the government to be called to account and ministers to be examined than there is in the rather more helter-skelter proceedings in the House of Commons.
Amy:
And one area in particular the committee will be considering is autonomous weapons systems. So systems that can select and attack a target without human intervention. Why do you think it's important to have a Lords Committee looking at this issue now?
Lord Lisvane:
It's extremely important to have a select committee looking at it because it's a highly contentious issue and the evidence or the factual basis for a lot of views about AWS and of course about AI more generally is very often disputed. So a select committee, depending for its eventual judgements on the evidence that it hears, is a very good vehicle to take forward that element of... to analyse public policy and to take that forward as a means of supporting and enhancing debate.
So as far as a Lords select committee is concerned, again, I think we go back to the being able to draw on that well of expertise and experience. The committee’s relatively large at 13 members, but everybody has got something to contribute. It is highly bipartisan with four Labour, four Conservative, two Lib Dems, two Crossbenchers, and a Bishop. And that is always an advantage when you are looking at ethical matters, which of course we are in some detail. And the background that the members have I think is a great support and enhancement of the inquiry. We've got a former Secretary of State for Defence, Lord Browne of Ladyton. We've got a former minister for the Armed Forces, Lord Hamilton of Epsom. We've got a former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Lord Houghton of Richmond. So it's that sort of background that we can draw upon I think to make the inquiry more authoritative than it would otherwise be.
Amy:
And what will you be looking at during the inquiry?
Lord Lisvane:
Really every aspect that we can squeeze in the relatively limited time available. There is this issue of meaningful human control. So there is the trade-off between being able to say that you have an accountable person who is part of the chain of decision and that person being able to operate quickly enough to make a weapon system effective. So that's just one example. And there I think we need to probe in some detail the current government policy, which we are doing at the moment.
We also need to look at the way in which the potential use of AWS fits within international humanitarian law. And that is an extremely complex area where we're able to draw on some highly expert support. So those are the sorts of issues. If we move down the AWS route, what difference will that make to the way in which weapons systems are procured? What difference will it make to the UK's global standing? Is there going to be an arms race in effect on AWS? So all of those things, as you can imagine, that's quite a complicated tapestry and we are doing our best to unpick some of it in order to reach robust and resilient conclusions.
Amy:
Well, to help you examine all those areas, you're currently taking evidence from external experts. Who have you been speaking to and what have you been hearing from witnesses?
Lord Lisvane:
We've had quite a variety of witnesses from thinktanks, from academic sources, from the MOD, and we've been exploring really the issues that I mentioned a moment ago. I think one of the things that has been central to the evidence that we've taken is this understanding, trying to reach an understanding of what autonomous weapons systems really are. What is involved when you have a system like that? Do you have systems which are artificial intelligence enabled in their entirety or where a function, an AI function supports what they do? So that is the sort of thing. We've also been hearing and we will hear in an evidence session this week about the ethical problems that may arise. And being able to reach towards ideas of how AWS might be regulated, I think is something extremely valuable that the committee could do.
Amy:
And I suppose that's in one way the sort of bigger issue rather than why these systems are used or, sort of literally, how they're used, but rather if they should be used.
Lord Lisvane:
Well, I think you put your finger on it because there are things that we wish we'd never invented, like nuclear weapons, like landmines, but they've been invented. So we've had to find ways. And with nuclear weapons, we hope we have. And with landmines, we hope in terms of international conventions we have. So AWS probably falls into the third, potentially threatening, but also a big challenge in terms of international agreement and regulation. But in order to regulate, you have to define and you have to understand what systems will do.
Amy:
And what's next for the committee?
Lord Lisvane:
We are talking this week to three witnesses who I think will give us an insight into the regulatory side of things, but particularly also are in a good position to set out concerns on the ethical front. So that will be balancing some of the earlier evidence that we've been taking and we're going to continue. Our next move will be looking more at the strategic side and talking to people who've been involved in the military and still are. We will be talking to ministers at some stage later on in the inquiry. We're planning two visits, one to Cambridge and one to Glasgow and Edinburgh in a combined visit. So which will give us an opportunity to see hands on how systems work and what is actually involved. We've inevitably been talking quite theoretically. And in a committee room in the House of Lords, theoretical is fine, but I think the committee, and certainly I am, very keen to see on the ground as it were, how systems work.
Amy:
Lord Lisvane, thank you for joining us.
Lord Lisvane:
It's been a great pleasure. Thank you very much.
Lord Redesdale
Lord Redesdale:
Hello. I'm Lord Redesdale and I'm chairing the House of Lords Horticultural Select Committee.
Amy:
Lord Redesdale, you are the chair of the new Lords committee looking into the horticultural sector. First of all, what exactly do we mean by the horticultural sector?
Lord Redesdale:
So this has been some debate within the committee over what we're actually covering. So horticulture really covers ornamentals, which includes garden centres through to growing houseplants and ornamental trees even, through to fruit and vegetables, which is a whole different area because it also includes potatoes even though you wouldn't see that usually as being included in horticulture.
Amy:
So when you think of the horticultural sector, some people may think it's more about flowers and things like that, but there’s actually a lot more that it encompasses?
Lord Redesdale:
Well, I have to admit, this is the first time being chair of a select committee and when you come up and say, 'Oh, which select committee?' and you go horticulture, everybody goes, 'Oh, that's nice.' Because I think people haven't really got a clear idea. Yes, you look at the ornamental sector, which covers garden centres, but of course that's a complicated area in itself because you have to grow the flowers themselves. There's real issues about going peat free, how we're going to go forward with... Everybody buys houseplants. So we're all part of that side of the horticultural sector. But of course then you've got fruit and vegetables, which is, we've got a real problem with losing orchards at the moment because the price is not high enough to actually keep them going. It’s just the size of the industry that I find interesting, it’s hundreds of thousands of jobs, it’s billions in turnover. So yes, it’s a really important sector but the problem of course as a sector is because it's so wide, there's no one sort of overarching body that says this is important. Of course, that has a real impact on when you're looking for subsidies or when you're looking for government support or when you're looking for initiatives to help the sector. It's very difficult to get the different parts together.
Amy:
So it's actually quite a large sector, covers a lot of different areas. Why do you think it's important to look at this now?
Lord Redesdale:
The difficulty horticulture has is because it's such a wide sector and falls under so many different headings, it's one of those areas that has not been focused on, but considering hundreds of thousands of people work in the industry and it's incredibly important for our food security. It seems unfortunate that this sector isn't seen as, as important as certain others, even though we really rely on it. So I think what we're trying to do with this committee is bring many of the issues together under one report and then go to the government and say, 'These are the things you need to think about, especially as we're focusing on climate change and technology.' Climate change is going to change how we grow things in this country.
Amy:
So how does the horticultural sector and climate change impact one another?
Lord Redesdale:
So obviously you're growing in many cases, crops that are quite delicate, so you can have awful situations. The climate's been all over the place recently, so you can have late frost. So for apple growers that could wipe out the blossom, really affect the harvest. Just recently we've been having real problems with massive rainfall, which of course can flood out fields and make it very difficult to actually harvest certain types of leaf vegetable. And the area that I found really interesting, which was when we had empty shelves, it's that we're not just affected by climate change here and water's going to be a big issue and the availability of water. It's also that climate change affected import from other countries. So it was too hot in Morocco, it was too cold and wet in other places, I think Spain had a problem. And if these come together, then there just isn't the produce available.
And I suppose the other area we'll be looking at particularly is water. We really are going to face water shortages across the country over the next 10 years. And that's going to affect how we look at water as a really precious resource. And we're going to have to start thinking about what we use water for. I mean, one of the areas that I find quite scary is that supply and demand for water in the Thames region is going to go the wrong way within about eight years. We aren't going to have enough water to meet demand.
Amy:
So where do supermarkets come into all of this?
Lord Redesdale:
There's a complicated relationship between growers and supermarkets. And at the moment there's a real problem that a lot of growers are saying that they just can't meet the costs because there's been a number of problems with the cost base. COVID meant that you couldn't get pickers. Brexit has meant that there's real problems, import and export, because of disease control on certain produce. But of course the problem we have with the supermarkets is they're locked into price promises matching each other, coming up with the lowest cost. And to do that, they then have to reduce the amount they're paying to the growers.
When we've talked to the supermarkets, they say, 'Well, we have to have a very close relationship with the growers to make sure we have produce on the shelf.' But in a cost of living crisis, obviously you want food as low as possible, but we are ending up with a situation where I think a lot of British growers are going to go out of business and therefore you're going to end up with bringing in stuff from abroad. And eventually, of course, the price will rise if there's not the supply. So we've been talking to the growers and we're very keen on talking to the supermarkets. At the moment, they're not very keen on talking to us, which is a real issue if you're a select committee looking at this. So we will be pressing them to put their case forward. And if they don't, I think that's a story in itself.
Amy:
And the committee's hearing from experts in this area. Who have you been speaking to and what have you been hearing from them?
Lord Redesdale:
We've been speaking to the leaders in the horticultural sector, the trade bodies, individuals who are growers, family growers. Now we're looking at the issue around seasonal workers, so we'll be looking at all the bodies involved with that, but including the farmers on the ground, which I think is an area which is often forgotten that when you look at larger issues, horticulture is made up of a lot of family farms or family-run firms and it's a really difficult position they are faced with at the moment with rising costs. Of course one of the areas we're looking at is the cost of food and the lower the cost of food, the more difficult it is to make a profit in the horticultural sector.
Amy:
Picking up on seasonal workers who, on the day of record, you're about to have a session in the committee, hearing from experts in that area, what sort of things will you be asking and hoping to find out?
Lord Redesdale:
I think we've really looked at some of the issues around where seasonal workers come from. So we have this view that seasonal workers came from states which are now within the European Union, but that's no longer the case. It's more and more difficult to get seasonal workers. And this is not a problem that the UK is facing. It's a problem that's been faced by Germany, France, other countries. So you're now looking at seasonal workers from Indonesia or Nepal, which has a real issue on how you make sure that those workers when they come over aren't exploited. But it's a very complicated picture. So a lot of those workers have great conditions here, but it might be that to get the job in the first place, they have to pay middlemen in that third country. And so they come over with debts already.
So it's looking at some of the really difficult issues around making sure that the workers' rights are respected. But there is, of course, a second problem and that's following on from Brexit, understanding how we can actually deal with the numbers we need. And the home office has not provided the numbers of visas required, the sector believes. And also you have a real difficulty with seasonal workers, which is that picking a very precise time as I was talking about with climate change where you might have periods where the harvest is not ready, that can cause real problems because you've got people turning up and there's nothing for them to do.
Amy:
And what's next for the committee?
Lord Redesdale:
So the next area the committee is going to be looking at is automation and technology moving forward. Robotics is one of the things we've been looking at. But whilst it seems a great idea putting a robot in a field, some of the crops they're looking at are incredibly difficult to deal with. The ones that's been highlighted is strawberries. Trying to get a robot that can pick a strawberry without crushing it is quite difficult. And, of course, that's the problem. When we look at the harvesting, it's a skilled job. When you have a seasonal worker, they can use both hands to pick apples at the same time. And trying to automate the system is not simple, but there are some interesting examples out there.
Lord Bird
Lord Bird:
Hi, my name is John Bird, Lord Bird of Notting Hill, which is the area that I was born in, in London. I'm a Crossbencher. I've been in the House I think six years. And I'm here in my role as a representative of people in poverty. And I'm here to dismantle poverty and not simply make the poor more comfortable.
Amy:
Lord Bird, you joined the House as a Crossbench member and perhaps are most known for founding the Big Issue. First of all, could you tell us a bit about your early life and work?
Lord Bird:
Yeah. Well, I was born just after the end of the second World War. So I was actually conceived about the time the war was ending in April, 1945. And I was born at the end of January, January the 30th, 1946. I was born into a very slummy part of London at the time called Notting Hill.
And I was born into a very big house that was divided amongst about eight families. There was one toilet, so if you wanted to use the toilet, you'd probably have to book two days in advance. And it was rattling cold, full of lice, mice, rats. It was an appalling, absolutely appalling place. The communal garden out the back was dug up and made into a rubbish tip. But I absolutely loved it. And I was never been happier than playing around in the mud and the muddles and the puddles and having everybody in the street almost a part of you, even though we weren't family.
We were a London Irish family. And actually I did find out much later when I was 69 that in fact, my father wasn't my father. My mother had been what they used to call ‘playing away from home’. So I found out when I was 69 that actually I'm not half Irish and half English because my mother was Irish. I'm 95% Irish and 5% Spanish.
But I lived in this terrible place, which I loved and I looked upon as home. But we never had any money. My parents were not very good at looking after the little money that they had. My father would spend a vast amount of his wages in the pub on a Saturday night. There was a lot of domestic violence and there was a lot of problems in that area. And when I grew up, I was in and out of prisons and places like that.
But when I was 18, I stopped my father hitting my mother for the last time by giving him a good kicking and he never touched her again. But she had all of those years of violence directed against her and directed against me because I was the one always in and out of trouble. So I mean, the predictability of failure, if you go into our custodial system, you will find that nine times out of 10, the people there are people who did very badly at school. So they failed at school. That's one of the corollaries.
They come from the disenfranchised sections of the working class. They have mental health problems and physical health problems. So they come from poverty. So poverty in a way is a great recruiting sergeant for people who end up in the prison system.
Amy
And growing up through that sort of turbulent childhood and teenage years that you've touched on, did you ever imagine that you'd be sitting in the House of Lords as a member?
Lord Bird:
No, I didn't. But you see, the thing was, if I was born into poverty in Glasgow or Sheffield, you would have this idea of London, this big place, and the Houses of Parliament. Well, I mean, I could get a bus from our slum or two buses, change at Victoria, and I could be here, I could be here in 20 minutes, half an hour.
I could get the underground because we lived near the underground. So I would be down in Parliament Square as a four-year-old and a five-year-old wandering around, and I'd walk through the great parks. So on occasions at the age of five and six, I would be wandering around. So I always looked at the Houses of Parliament and I actually thought it was where they made HP sauce [laughter] because HP sauce. So I said to my dad one day, I said, me and my brothers, we'd been to the factory that makes HP sauce.
And he said, 'Where's that?' I said, 'Well, it's down by the river, it's Parliament somewhere.' And he said, 'Oh no.' He said, 'That's the House of Commons' or whatever. Anyway, Houses of Parliament. No, but I never perceived or conceived of myself ever being any more than what my dad was, which was working in the building trade.
So I always thought I might climb up the ladder and become a plasterer. He was a general factotum. He was a lovely man. Don't get me wrong. He was a brilliant man as long as he wasn't in his tempers. And he was a very loving father except for those terrible intermissions. And it was largely because he had six boys and he was right at the bottom of the pile and he struck out because that's what happens in poverty.
But no, I never perceived of myself or thought, I mean, I thought when I was a bit older, I wanted to be a scrap metal merchant because every scrap metal merchant I knew had a wallet of notes, kind of ten shilling notes. They might have 50 of them. But no, I saw myself as a kind of tradesman and in the end I ended up as a printer and became a tradesman, so to speak that way.
Amy:
And maybe we can touch a bit more on your, for want of a better word, journey to the House of Lords. Was there ever sort of a turning point, I guess, for you or big moment of change to bring you out of where you grew up?
Lord Bird:
Well, when I did my maiden speech, when people ask me, how did you end up in the House of Lords? And I said, ‘by lying, cheating, and stealing’. And what I meant by that, and I explained was that every time I got nicked as a teenager or preteen, every time I got nicked, they taught me something. So I learned in a boys' prison, I learned to perfect my reading and writing in just a matter of weeks because a prison officer gave me a book and he got me to underline all the words that I didn't understand.
And the words were, all those linking words, they weren't big words like Constantinople and all that stuff. So here I could find my way around this foreign language called English, and I could even sit exams, but I couldn't really, the sentences wouldn't make up. So in this boys’ prison, nearly 16, I was nearly 16, so that was an enormous change, but it took me another 10 years to get myself sorted out.
And then when I went, I was then, because we'd stolen a car and smashed it up at about 87 miles an hour, a little sports car because I'd run away from this other institution, and then I was put in prison and I went back to this other young offenders institute. And when I was there, they asked me, what do you want to do in your spare time because you had spare time.
And what a lot of them did was woodwork or stuff like that, or stuffing toys for the local hospital, stuffing kapok in and sewing them up and all that. And I said, I want to draw and paint because I had this idea. I loved drawing and painting. And when I was at school, the only thing I ever did well was art. So I started to draw and paint and the officers or whatever, they thought it was brilliant.
So I got better and better and better, and they would give me books and all that. And then they changed their mind when they said, what do you want to do when you leave here? I said, 'I want to be a painter.' They said, 'But you can't be a painter. You can't make money.' And they thought if I didn't have a job, I'd go stealing, which is exactly what I did later.
I was a thieving art student. Anyway, and I was homeless. So I actually came out of that place after a couple of years and I could read and write. I had enormous knowledge of art history because they'd given me books and I'd read it almost encyclopedic and I'd read Russian novels, I'd read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and all that.
And I went back to my working-class home and there was nobody there who I could talk to because my parents were not educated, didn't want to talk about Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Cimabue or Giotto, or they didn't want to go to the National Gallery. So I felt very odd. And then I was going to evening classes.
I got a job as a labourer for the Royal Borough of Kensington in the gardens department, putting up fences and concrete paths and climbing up trees and all that. So I'd be working from 7:30 till 5:30. Then I'd rush to an art class and go and draw in there. And I met a young lady who was an art student, and she said, 'Why don't you just go to Chelsea School of Art and pretend you're a student?' So I went there and I drew my first nude.
And then I was drawing naked ladies or naked men, mainly naked ladies for every night Monday to Friday. And I became pretty good at it and it's a wonderful thing to draw and to paint. And then I said to one of the instructors, I said, 'Do you think I should apply for art school?' And he said, he was a French person, he said, 'I thought you were already an art student, but that is why you are here.'
And I said, 'I'm not an art student.' He said, 'Apply.' So I applied
Lord Bird:
Anyway, so anyway, so I met this young woman and I then fell into love. And the art went out the window and we got married and I had a daughter and my life just went all funny and went down the tubes. And I spent the next quite a few years avoiding work and avoiding everything and thieving and doing all sorts of stuff like that and getting drunk.
And so I lost my focus. So in the end, my wife left me when I was 21 and I'd got into trouble with the police again and I got into trouble with the courts and all that sort of stuff. So I ran off, ran away to Paris, not to be an artist, not to be a writer, but to be a thief.
And I met this haute bourgeois Marxist woman in, I was 21, she was 18, she was a student at the Sorbonne.
And within a matter of months she'd completely changed me and I came back as a Marxist, Engelist, Leninist, Trotskyist to destroy capitalism. And I joined a revolutionary group.
And that was the transformation. You ask about the transformation. That was when I became the pain in the rear that I've become. I started off being the pain in the rear to capitalism, but we didn't have to worry about destroying capitalism because Wall Street is pretty good at that. So I came back and I spent the next 10 years trying to destroy capitalism, working in factories and trying to convert people.
And I met another young lady and we had children. And then I had picked up some skills as a printer when I was away and I wanted to be a printer. So I got jobs as a printer and I did it in the typical John Bird way. I'd get a job and after about three hours they'd say, you can't print. So I'd lose it. So I had about nine jobs and by the time I'd got to the end of the ninth job, I knew how to print.
So I got a job working for the English Folk Dance and Song Society and I was their printer up in Camden Town. And I printed my own books and I printed magazines and I started publishing and all sorts of stuff like that. And I was in this revolutionary group and I was like, it's all over the place. I had little motorbike, went everywhere, selling prints and selling stuff.
And then my lust for the revolutionary movement shrunk largely because it was a very…
So I fell out of love with the revolutionary movement. And also they were all moralising. They were always looking for, they were defining themselves by the failures of others, which to me, I don't do that.
So in the chamber, I don't want to pick on the government, I don't want to pick on the opposition. I am a true crossbencher. I just want to see how can we work with people so we can bring social transformation. And therefore I work with people who you would not go down the pub with or you wouldn't invite them to your dinner party. You may. But the thing is, I am really religiously, I don't moralise about who is good and who is bad.
And I got all of that because I'd been through Marxism and all the left stuff. And then I really prospered under Margaret Thatcher because I started my own printing business and it went like this. It went up. One week, I was getting 37 pounds a week as a printer. And the next month when I bought a machine and converted my garage because my wife's family had helped buy a house for us, so I converted the garage and I had a print shop. And one week I was on £37 and the first month of trade I made a profit of 700 pounds.
And Maggie had just come in and I said, 'Oh.' Oh no, she was just about to come in. So I became a bit of a Thatcherite for a while and then when she started kicking the unions around, I went off her because I thought she was there for the working classes because she came from poor stock and all that. And she had a posh accent, but she had to learn that, didn't she, that was required to talk.
Anyway, so there's been a number of transformations. Then when I got to about 40 and I had my children and they were growing up, I had two children, I thought to myself, I've been through all this muck, this mire, there must be a way of helping other people who were in it.
So I started working with homeless organisations and I did their printing. So I didn't go along and clean up for them because they had a number of… anybody can clean up but nobody could print and promote what they were doing. So I helped them design stuff and I printed it up and I got it done for cost. So I worked with the Simon Community and I really loved them because what they would do, they would take anybody, ordinary people from wherever, and you would go and live in the hostels and you'd work with these people.
You wouldn't get paid, but you'd almost be... so you'd get to know the reality behind homelessness and the reality and the problems of what people were living and the problems that they were carrying. So when I got to 40, I was, 'I need to do something with my life.' I wasn't wealthy, but I mean I was comfortable and I was watching the telly one day and lo and behold, this very, very big nose Scotsman, I mean, it was ginormous nose. And I thought, I know that guy because I'd met him when I was hiding from the police in Edinburgh at the age of 21. And him and his wife and Richard Branson were launching a new condom range called Mates.
And this was a socially conscious condom company. And that guy was a guy called Gordon Roddick and his wife was Anita Roddick. And they'd started the Body Shop and they'd become multimillionaires. So here I was saying, 'what am I going to do next?' And I rang him up and we were great mates because we'd met when I was hiding from the police and I met him in a pub and I used to get him to buy me drinks, which he didn't.
And his nose was kind of like that. My nose was broken and all. We both looked as though a horse had trodden on us. And when I saw him, his nose looked even bigger because he'd shaved his beard off. [laughter] Anyway, sorry. But he became a great friend of mine and it was him who in 1990 went to New York and he was walking around Manhattan and he saw this guy who was like a wardrobe walking towards him and he thought, oh, this looks bad news. And it was a guy who was selling a paper called Street News.
So the guy said, 'Excuse me sir, would you like a copy of my street paper?' And Gordon said, 'Yeah, how much is it?' He says, 'It's a dollar.' He said, 'How does it work?' He says, 'Well, I buy it for 50 cents and I sell it for a dollar.' And he says, 'Why'd you do that?' He says, well, I come from Brownsville.' Brownsville where Mike Tyson comes from. He said, 'You don't get out of there without a prison sentence or unless you're a sportsman.'
And he said, 'I've been in and out of the prison, penitentiary system for most of my life. I'm 54. If I get nicked again, they'll throw the key away and I will never see my children. So now I'm selling this paper, I'm earning my own money. I am not on benefit or anything like that. Everything I make pays for my room and it pays for me to send some money to my child who I want to see go through to college.'
So Gordon said, 'Great.' In London, at that time in 1990, the last year of Thatcher, there were thousands of homeless people sleeping in the streets because one of the things that Margaret Thatcher's administration had done apart from closing down virtually all of the main industries and causing nearly a million people to be on social security, she'd closed down the mental institutions and not replaced them with anything. It's called care in the community, which didn't really mean anything.
And I was campaigning at the time, this was before the Big Issue saying 'if you close down the appalling mental institutions and not replace them with something, then what will happen is the streets will fill up, the hospitals will fill up and the prisons will fill up.' 60%, 70% of people in prisons have mental health problems. And that's exactly what happened, that one cost-cutting exercise.
And we are still living the madness of not just closing down all of those industries, I'm not being particularly political here because I think there was something needed to be done. She closed down all of those industries and as Lord Tebbit said recently they didn't put enough back to so that people could go to another job.
They should have done it slower and they should have reinforced the community with new jobs and new opportunity and education. So that's one of the reasons why the streets were full up and a lot of them were northern kids. And then there was another innovation done by the government, which was if you came from a social security family, your parents were on it. And a lot of people in the north were, the whole family. If you left school at 16 from the age of 16 to 18, you would get social security and they took that away. So suddenly a family would have less income.
And then it caused fights and arguments and children as young as 16 and 17 just hit the streets. And when we started working in the Big Issue, there was an enormous amount of youngsters from Manchester and Newcastle and all the ex-mining areas.
And so Gordon thought if we'd get this paper over here, we could actually give people alternatives to begging, to stealing and to prostitution. And this is to me, people might complain, oh the Big Issue's still here and we haven't got rid of homelessness. I said, 'I didn't start the Big Issue to get rid of homelessness. I started the Big Issue so that people could earn money so that when they earned their money, they earned their own money and they didn't have to get into trouble to earn the money.'
They didn't. And if they had habits like cigarettes or drugs or drink, they didn't have to rob your granny to do that. So I decriminalised the homeless and to me, and I have to keep telling people because they forget that, it is the greatest thing I've ever done. And whatever I do from now on, hence forth from how long I'm in the House of Lords, that decriminalisation of people by giving them a legitimate way of making money is the ...
So we work with all sorts of people from all over the world who have come to the UK because if we don't work with them, they'll get into trouble.
Amy:
And you often ask questions to government about these issues, about homelessness and support for those on low incomes. Why do you think it's important to put those questions to ministers and hold the government to account on those issues?
Lord Bird:
Well I should explain why I came into the Lords and then you'll see what I mean by that. But you see, the thing is I got cheesed off 10 years after the Big Issue started in 2001, 9/11 actually was our anniversary, 2001, this journalist from The Times asked me, 'All right John Bird, you've been doing this for the last 10 years, what are you going to do for the next 10 or 20 years?' And I said, 'Well, what I've been doing is, so far, is I've been mending broken clocks and for the next 10 or 20 years I'm going to try and prevent the clocks breaking.' So I'm going to move into prevention.
It took me a while. And I got really excited at the idea, I have invented a way of being able to establish what a social business or a charity was doing. And I called it PECC, prevention, emergency, coping and cure. So if you take that and you put it over any organisation or endeavour, you can say, is this a prevention? Is this preventing the problem happening or is it an emergency?
Is it a means of responding to something that's gone wrong? Is it a coping thing like holding their hand while they're still in poverty or in need or is it a cure? 80% of all the money spent by government and in the world is spent on emergency and coping. If you look at the social security bill, the social security bill is largely made up with helping people cope with the emergency of poverty.
Not to get them out, not to get them to Oxbridge, not to get them places where they can shine and bubble, where their children can grow. It's just holding fast. It's like the bus of opportunity is going to come sometime and we're standing at the bus stop and it never arrives. And in my opinion, I needed to... So I developed this methodology which has been used in Wales and it's been used in Australia and we're now going back to it.
And I thought, I've got to put the P and the C on the end of emergency and coping because the area I was working in was emergency and coping. So I had to do prevention. So we invented a finance business called the Big Issue Invest. We invest in 500 social businesses around the UK and all the money doesn't come from the selling of the paper, it comes from money that we get from banks and from trusts and all that.
And they give us the money and we package it up and put it into places and into everything. We've invested in schools, we've invested in hospices, we've invested in all sorts of things. Anyway, so I got to a situation about 2010 and I kept pushing this prevention and then the Big Issue Invest was really beginning to take off. And I thought the real problem is people are still not getting a hold of this thing.
And then somebody said to me, 'You ought to go into the House of Lords.' And I said, 'Well, I don't want to go in with them, talking shop, what are they going to do?' And then what happened about 2012, I got really cheesed off, I have to say all these people saying John Bird, you're like a beautiful butterfly. You're so fresh. I mean all this, I'm not joking. I'd go there, people say, wow, if only I could be John Bird.
And I would say, look, I wasn't John Bird, I've become John Bird with 3%, a little step at a time. Anybody can do what I am doing. I swear on my life. I'm not the brightest bloke on the block. I'm not clever, I'm not educated. I pick things up. And I realised, and then they were saying, John Bird, you really do know how to think outside the box.
And then it suddenly struck me. The reason they're telling me I can think outside the box is because the box isn't working. And then in 2012 I made the decision I would get in the box. So I applied and I was incredibly honest in my application to become a member of the House of Lords under the People's Peer, which Tony Blair had brought in.
And I applied and it was very simple. I just said, this is who I am and this is what I've done. Everybody who saw my application said, but you're not really selling yourself. I said, 'Look, if they don't want me, they don't want me.' So I sent this in about six months later. They said, sorry, we only appoint a couple a year, crossbenches, through this process, but we'll keep you on file. And then after, I think it was about two years, I don't know, they called me for an interview.
So I went to the interview and they said, they asked me all these questions, what would I do in the House of Lords? And I said, 'Well, I'm very interested in bringing in legislation and I'm very interested in looking at legislation even though I'm not very good at detail, but also, I want to get rid of poverty and I want to use the House of Lords as a methodology, using my methodology in the House of Lords.' Anyway, then they said to me, which was they said, I said, 'What's going to happen now?'
They said, 'Well, you'll either get a letter to say no thank you, you'll get a letter to say we'll put you down for another time or you will get a letter to say that you are in.' And then I said, 'Any more interviews?' And they said, 'No, no, we never call anybody back.'
So a year passes and then I get a letter saying, would I come for an interview? So I thought myself, I've already been for an interview. I've already given you my half an hour anyway. And then Lord Kakkar who was running the thing said, 'You'll hear from us.' And then maybe three months later I got a phone call to say that Lord Kakkar wanted to talk to me. So I nearly fell over, I was in a gardening centre drinking tea and I dropped the tea and it went all down my trousers. [Laughter]
So I was trying to have a conversation and clean up and he said, 'Congratulations, you are in.' And then about six months later, that was July and then six months later it was announced in the press
So I came into the House of Lords to dismantle poverty.
See what I find so strange is that the House of Lords, it's a very interesting place that it hides its light under a bushel...
There's probably, I would say probably 300, maybe a bit more, really active peers. And they are people who are hereditary, life peers, they're Conservatives, they Labour, they're Lib Dem, they're whatever. And so actually it's a pretty neat arrangement. When it's full, it is full and I think it takes about 500. But the thing is, it looks at the detail. And I remember one of the first things I did when I came in the house was looked at the Housing Bill.
And the Housing Bill, and I don't want to slag off the other place because they don't like that and they might close me down, anyway, but the Housing Bill, to me, it was a bit like the Commons had put together this boat and they'd floated it down the river to us. And then we got on the boat and made it seaworthy because it wasn't seaworthy.
And I got involved in the detail and that. And I thought, this is why people are here. Now, that's not my strength. And I use the House of Lords to project the work that I do in the Big Issue and in society in general around prisons and around poverty and around future generations, which is one of my great ambitions to get a law about future generations similar to the wonderful stuff that's been done in Wales around future wellbeing of future generations. And so you've got to hold the government to account, but you can't just do that by telling them off in the chamber. You've got to go and have meetings with them.
So I go and have meetings with ministers in and around the specialist areas and I've met quite a number of them. And people say, why do you want to talk to Michael Gove? And I say, 'Well I know Michael Gove and we can have a working relationship.' So when the Covid thing hit, lo and behold we were one of the first persons who were called on to remove our people from the streets and put them and help with the process of getting people housed because they had hoped for, they'd planned on receiving I think about five or 6000 and there was 32000 that they had to lift off the streets. So there were all thoughts of things like that.
Then one of the big campaigns that we ran was to try and prevent people falling into homelessness because of Covid. So we led this really big campaign rattling and rattling and always asking the government, concentrating on the government, focusing our thing, don't allow people to slip into homelessness. And unfortunately quite a number of other players in the field were saying things like, 'oh, what we need is we need the government to make sure when people fall homeless, they have a pretty good temporary accommodation, transitional housing or whatever.'
And I was saying, 'No, no, that's too late. You imagine any of us falling into homelessness, you imagine your parents falling into homelessness and you are a young child. What's that going to do to your school? What's that going to do to your social life? What's that going to do to your wellbeing?' So prevention was really, really important. And we banged on, we created something called, I forget the name of it, it was Ride Out Recession Alliance, RORA or something like that. I mean it's another one of my nutty inventions. So we did that and we got people like Unilever and Nationwide to do things.
So Nationwide immediately said, we will not issue any evictions for the next year if people have fallen behind with their mortgages and all that stuff. And then we got the Co-Op to do that as well. So the Co-Op stopped because they have a lot of shops. So we were being very, very practical and eventually the government did put money into this 'stop homelessness' and they put in the region of about 650 million, which was what we were largely asking for.
So that only happened because there were people like me, and I don't know who else was doing it, it was me putting my arm around the government, come on lads, come on, come on.
And we had a bill that came through the house of the second reading on Friday, and it's my bill in the house, but it's Simon Fell MP for Barrow and Furness. It's his bill. It was a private member's bill. It was taken up by the government. And I'm the sponsor in the House of Lords. So I'm working with Lord Bellamy, I'm working with the government to stop Friday releases from prison because if you release somebody on a Friday, then they can't get the services because they close at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon.
Matt:
How does the sponsorship come about? I've always been interested in this? Are you approached or how did you come to be the sponsor?
Lord Bird:
Well, I think it came through Simon Fell. And the reason for that is because Simon and I have worked on a bill, which is the Wellbeing of future Generations Bill. So I started it in the Lords, and he took it over in the Commons. So it became his bill there. I'm very, very interested in being useful in an area which is practical. And I mean our Wellbeing of Future Generations, Bill, we are redesigning it because it does look a bit, 'what if?' it's a bit airy fairy.
Matt:
So is that how you are seeing private members bills? You've mentioned a few there that you've piloted, so you're obviously very keen on them, but you're not looking necessarily for them to become law. You want to make the change.
Lord Bird:
I want to make the change and I want to be an irritation as well as a practical person. I want them to feel, oh God, this guy, we've got to listen to this guy. And I'm in the infancy of my parliamentary career. If the Lord gives me enough time, I want to do this for another five or six years into my early 80s. And I want to see PECC, prevention, emergency, coping and cure, I want to see PECC everywhere. So when people want to invest in something or when you want to give part of your wage, you say, oh, where should I give my 10 pound a month or whatever? Prevention or coping or emergency? So I want to PECC-ify the country. I want people to know where they are in the PECC-ing order. [Laughter] There you are.
Matt:
Obviously your life story today, it's been all about learning. What have you learned about the House of Lords from being a member?
Lord Bird:
I've learned that, well this has come as a bit of a surprise, I never fitted in anywhere. And the reason for that is because I didn't really fit in when I was a child because I had very bad life and I was in and out of prison and I was in an orphanage and stuff like that. And I always felt I was in somebody else's world.
And then even when went to art school, I never really fitted in. And when I joined the revolutionary group, I didn't fit in. I didn't fit anywhere. I was some kind of awkward three-legged man or something like that. When I came into the House of Lords, you are in there and they all know why you are there and they know what you've done. So immediately there is a camaraderie and an openness and nobody can walk around the House with me without me slowing down and talking to one of the staff, one of the police officers, because they're all brilliant.
Or talking to the catering because I used to wash up in the House of Lords 52 years ago. So I'm that kind of geezer. And I mean, there are some people who kind of poo-poo, they look up their nose at me, but most of them say, I like what you do and it's wonderful. It's like walking around with a sign saying, this bloke knows what he's talking about.
I would also like to see more people like me who didn't start life at the start of the race. We started way back. We were coming from behind. We were way back. And many, many of us in this country don't start nowhere near the starting line. And I got to the starting line probably when I was in my late teens or early 20s. I want to bring those people into the House of Lords. I want people who are not interested in politics. I want to inspire them to be interested in politics, which will bring about social change.
Matt:
Lord Bird, thank you for joining us.
Lord Bird:
I've loved it. I've loved every minute of it, and I hope you do.