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I proposed this ministry and proposed myself as its first minister. I have yet to hear if it will be adopted by the government.
A department of government that is necessary because we have so many examples of people falling through the gaps that exist in the safety net.
Of course, both of my ideas are ridiculous. Imagine a ministry that in some ways underlines the charge that government has a safety net that often doesn’t work. That fails in its ability to provide for the security of people in need.
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You imagine what grief would be handed out by this minister to all other ministers, underlining their failure to provide. You would not be popular and you would find that denials would flow thick and fast.
And as for the bike lights: what lunatic would suggest that we develop a kind of bike light system that is only activated once the collision takes place. So a minister for filling the holes is going to win no prizes; nor a bike light system per the above.
Yet is there not a need to recognise that there are too many holes in our safety systems? That now we have people falling into homelessness because they have lost their ability to pay for their accommodation, in spite of government promises to use the safety net for them.
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Where is the safety net? How can we prevent the half a million people who are behind in their rent or mortgage from being evicted?
So we have a need for a minister that fills these holes, but we won’t get him/her.
With regard to my ingenious bike light system, you may laugh. But don’t we at the moment almost have that situation?
Where much of a government’s expenditure is spending money to cope with a problem that has already happened. Where prevention is too much for the Treasury to contemplate. Where the collision happens, and only then does the government money flow.
So for people slipping into eviction and then homelessness, intervening when they are actually homeless is a bit like my light system: completely ridiculous for the situation. Completely illogical. You need to keep people in their homes, pay off their arrears, support them when they are in the emergency and work to get them back into the job market. Forgive me my irony.
There is so much about an emergency-driven world that looks foolish. That looks as illogical as my lights for bikes. How do we train ourselves out of this? How do we garner the evidence to learn once and for all how to respond to true emergencies, and not just planned-for emergencies. Emergencies which are entirely preventable, because you respond before the problem is allowed to deteriorate into an emergency. Emergencies are often created because we do not respond when the problem is a small thing, before it becomes a big thing.
Of course, the big conference at COP26 is one hell of an emergency response that took years to build up because of a lack of responding earlier. In some ways emergencies can destroy us all, because we’ve left things too late.
Let’s hope that whatever comes out of COP26 isn’t just more of the same: leaving the emergency to another day, when it’s passed from the manageable to the catastrophic.
John Bird is the founder and Editor in Chief of The Big Issue.
@johnbirdswords
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