The Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act and Future Generations Commissioner – and Why We Need It Worldwide by Lord John Bird
Confident of cross-party support across both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, I am bringing a Future Generations Bill to the UK Parliament. In imitation of the Welsh Well-being of Future Generations Act and inspired by Wales’ example, I am convinced it is the most useful piece of legislation imaginable. It is inspiring because it brings the future forward to today.
I am not a lawmaker, but a practitioner. I work with people who have fallen through all the nets so far provided by state and society. I work with people who need a hand up, not simply a handout. But I cannot do this for ever. I cannot simply leave as the principal part of my legacy a ‘picking up when fallen down’ bespoke service. I strive to prevent. To make tomorrow more useful to us all.
More than anything I am inspired when I see our generation not condemning future generations to arbitrary and short-term initiatives. I have therefore welcomed with open arms the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act and particularly the post of Future Generations Commissioner.
We may all choose to come at the Welsh legislation, enacted in 2015, from a different perspective. I came late to it, once it had been enacted. But once I grasped its significance, and its ability to be replicated worldwide, I became a willing convert.
My particular take was that it seemed to me to be the biggest and most strident means of preventing all the social diseases and illnesses that we wrestle with daily and which the UK Parliament spends upwards of 70 per cent of its time trying to make sense of – the problems that leak out of poverty and pervert the course of our thinking and actions as we struggle to come to terms with inequality, injustice and the wasted skills of people caught in the clutches of need.
The Welsh Future Generations’ Act is about thinking before doing. Planning before doing. Projecting before doing. It is thoughtful in the sense that it draws on that one thing we do not know about the future: that is how it will turn out. A future generations act, wherein all actions pass through the prism of what effect they will have on future generations – as far as we are capable of imagining – seems to me to be what I had been trying to do for the previous 15 years.
In 1991 I founded The Big Issue, a street paper based on a US model. It gave homeless and vulnerably accommodated people, among them people who often came out of local authority care, the armed forces or prison, the chance of making a legitimate income. It was a stabiliser for people who, like me, had come out of poverty and into homelessness as if it was our only birthright.
Ten years after starting The Big Issue, which has grown into an international movement, I was asked by The Times what I planned to do for the next ten years that was different from the last ten. I said without a thought: ‘I have spent ten years mending broken clocks. I want to spend the next twenty years preventing them breaking.’ It became my mantra. Eventually it led me to apply to become an independent Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. My argument was so simple and based on decades of homeless emergency work. However bright and clever you are working outside the box, if the box isn’t working, which it certainly wasn’t and isn’t, then you need to get in the box itself and mend it from inside. I realised that without reinventing Government itself, all of the bright and clever tricks that one pulls as a social entrepreneur can be washed away by crass governmental thinking and spending.
Asked one day by a wealthy woman who asked me how she should ‘invest’ her social money I came up with a simple rule of thumb. I called it the PECC method: Prevention, Emergency, Coping and Cure. Did she want to invest her social capital in preventing the problem from happening? Or did she want to invest in a well-made Emergency response that responded to crisis? Or did she want to help people who were in impossible positions cope and make their lives more bearable? Or was she interested in helping to Cure people of the afflictions of need?
When I realised that circa 80 per cent of social investment in the world is in Emergency and Coping – making do – and very little in Prevention or Cure. I was astonished. And out of that grew my determination to get into Parliament and try to influence this generation to prevent the social calumnies of today that often reflect a complete inability of understanding our future needs. In other words, how do we prevent tomorrow being a repeat of the failures of today?’ Or, to put it another way, do we have to fight for tomorrow today so that tomorrow is not another today?
When I came upon the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner and the Act that enabled the role, I could see a clarity of thinking I had not run into in any of my dealings with social dislocation – the stopgap-ism, the short-term, ad-hoc nature of most programmes and monies allocated.
To me, the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner puts on the governmental agenda a legerdemain thinking that should be enacted universally. Wales has led the way. It is a small-enough economy in order to measure its outputs. It is the world’s social laboratory and we should support it and encourage it. We should learn from the pluses and minuses it throws up when you try to make the future, not simply extend current inadequate thinking and doing. It unites all of the passions of today: environment, education, social justice, local and national quality of life, fairness and hope.
I recommend it to the world, to my five children and three grandchildren, and to whomever wants to see the end of simply thinking short term to a disastrous effect. The Future Generations argument needs embracing everywhere.
Lord John Bird, Founder of the Big Issue