Deprivation/Child Poverty

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Two things would need to happen for that to be achieved. An incredibly complicated piece of software must be updated in enormous and excruciating detail every time there is a benefits change to simplify the calculation. However, we can only go so far in improving that software to try to reduce the number of keystrokes in the way he describes. The fundamental problem is trying to model the effects of an appallingly complicated benefits system with multiple interactions and interdependencies. In an earlier report, one of the Committee's conclusions was that only a limited amount can be done by improving the software. We will need to simplify dramatically the benefits system and its interaction with tax credits before we will make much headway. It is fundamental, but that is the way that we need to head. May I finish off this point about the Government's overall approach to poverty by pressing the Minister on a particular question? As I understand it, the Government have committed themselves to three ways of viewing poverty and have, therefore, committed themselves to the policy outcomes and approach that I have just been describing. As I mentioned, one of those ways of assessing poverty is the internationally comparable OECD measure of 60 per cent. of median income. I had thought that that measure was part of the Government's approach; indeed, it appears throughout our report, and every time we made an international comparison, that was the measure that we used. However, in a recent debate about poverty—it was about pensioner poverty, but child poverty and pensioner poverty clearly share a common definition of poverty—two of the Minister's departmental colleagues sought to rubbish that measure of poverty. They said that the calculations by EUROSTAT, which seeks to make international comparisons, are somehow not to be believed. I appreciate that the Minister's colleagues were probably seeking to avoid embarrassment on the Floor of the House because they were being accused at the time of having engineered a situation in which Britain's pensioners were worse off than those anywhere else in the EU, apart from Latvia, Cyprus and Spain. However, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Plaskitt), said:"““The EUROSTAT survey measures the median income of each country and that of pensioners. The UK is relatively well-off so our poverty line is higher, and so our ““poorest pensioners”” are better off than the ““poorest pensioners”” in other countries. The motion's claim is therefore spurious.””—[Official Report, 4 June 2008; Vol. 476, c. 880.]" In the same debate, the Minister for Pensions Reform said:"““Because we are a wealthier country, our poverty level in the EUROSTAT statistics is set higher than that for most European countries. That is the way the EUROSTAT statistics are set…Our pensioners are therefore much better off than those in most other countries.””—[Official Report, 4 June 2008; Vol. 476, c. 848.]" I hope that the Minister will clarify the situation. The whole point of the measure using 60 per cent. of median income, which the Government and his Department have used until now, is that it is internationally comparable. It allows international comparisons to be made and conclusions to be drawn in the way that the Committee has just done in its report. It is therefore a little awkward, to put it politely, for the Government to want to have their cake and eat it by using those international comparisons when they show the Government's record in a flattering light, but back-pedalling rapidly when they come up with conclusions that Ministers do not like. Perhaps the Minister could therefore make it clear that the Government remain committed to that measure of poverty as one of the three that they use and that his colleagues were perhaps paddling rather furiously to avoid embarrassment on the Floor of the House, rather than necessarily being bang on in their representation of Government policy at the time. The Chairman of the Committee has covered the points made in the report in fairly comprehensive detail, so I shall focus on just one additional issue—child care. Child care is clearly one of the most important obstacles to taking parents and their children out of poverty. Although the Government have managed to engineer a substantial increase in the number of child care places over the past few years, that increase has come at a cost. There is not just the financial cost, although the Government have clearly come up with extra money to finance child care places. In increasing the number of places, however, they have also dramatically increased the amount of regulation, red tape and bureaucracy, as well as the expectations, surrounding child care places. There are sometimes excellent reasons for the changes. Some have happened because of child protection issues and because we have needed to ensure that Criminal Records Bureau checks on child care providers are done correctly. In other cases, the concern has been to improve the quality of child care, and that has led to regulations governing child care providers' minimum qualifications and the minimum ratios of child care providers to children. As a result of such provisions, however, the number and range of child care providers has been dramatically reduced as fewer organisations have been able to provide the care envisioned in the Government's guidelines, which have become substantially tougher and more serious. The cost of child care has also grown dramatically, and one direct result of that, which we can all see, is that child-minding provision has declined dramatically. As the Chairman of the Committee said, we have therefore ended up not only with an increase in the number of child care places, but with a dramatic increase in the number of vacancies and unused places, which now account for about 22 per cent. of places up and down the country. I suspect, as do many others, that that means that we have a monolithic, bureaucratic, over-engineered set of providers providing what the Government have defined as the right kind of care, which will, however, almost inevitably not match what parents want and need.