Alan Sugar has been labelled as “out of touch” after questioning why those in poverty owned mobile phones and televisions.
The businessman and Apprentice star, who is worth an estimated £1.4bn, told the Times:
“Who are the poor these days? You’ve got some people up north and in places like that who are quite poor, but they all have mobile phones, being poor, and they’ve got microwave ovens, being poor, and they’ve got televisions, being poor. Compare that to 60 years ago. If you really want to know what poor is like go and live where I lived in Hackney, where you didn’t have enough money for the electric, didn’t have a shilling for the meter.”
John Hilary, executive director at War on Want, said Lord Sugar did not understand what it meant to be poor in today’s Britain.
“Parents sleeping on kitchen floors because they don’t have enough beds. Disabled people driven to suicide as a result of losing their benefits. Immigrant families, like his own once was, working all hours of day and night just to make ends meet,” he said.
“The reality of poverty today is a million miles from his rosy picture of it. But as someone who’s been a multi-millionaire for the last 40 years, why would he know?”
Sugar said he had been a multi-millionaire since the age of 31, meaning the last time he could remember having to wait to afford something was when he was a teenager and wanted a new lens for his Yashica camera.
He said he only cared out the price of “planes and boats and things like that”, adding: “I don’t know the price of a loaf of bread. I don’t know the price of a pint of milk. I don’t know the price of a dozen eggs. A loaf of bread? No idea.”
The peer does not claim expenses for sitting in the House of Lords and donates his fees for appearing on The Apprentice to charity.
Sugar sold Amstrad, which made set-top boxes, to Sky for £125m in 2007 and his business interests are now focused on commercial property, with an empire that spans warehouses in Essex to upmarket developments in the City and Mayfair in London.
