Deprivation/Child Poverty

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning that example. The Government should be pressing schools to adopt such ideas, and they should have been doing so a while ago. The Government cannot say that there is no stigma to free school meals when the CPAG has pointed out that some schools run separate queues. If such techniques are available, the Government should accept that they have a role to play in dealing with that problem. The CPAG also talked about the Government's response in relation to Gypsy and Traveller families. The Government argue that Gypsy and Traveller families are a small group and that Office for National Statistics definitions do not allow separate measurement for that group. That answer is weak. Even if population surveys do not provide the evidence, the DWP could conduct specific research among that group to explore child outcomes. The group is known to face high levels of poverty and barriers to using services, therefore such research must be a priority. The Government should not be so complacent. It is a relatively small group, but a little action could have a major positive affect on those involved. Will the Minister look at that matter again? On large families, the CPAG and other organisations have long argued for the second and subsequent child on child benefit to be on the same rate as the first child. Although that was not accepted by the Committee, I certainly support that measure as it would have an impact on child poverty and is a simple way of dealing with child poverty in large families. Job retention is important in relation to in-work benefit—not just because people are better off in work and are out of child poverty when they are working, but because it means that people can stay in a job, particularly lone parents. The Government need to put more emphasis on in-work benefits to assist with job retention. As I said, a review was announced in the last Budget on housing benefit. Will the Minister give more details of the scope and progress of the review—not in this debate, but at some point soon? As far as I am aware, those details have not yet been placed in the public domain. Will the Minister ensure that the review has a specific mandate to consider reform of housing benefit for the best impact on child poverty? On benefits uprating generally, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently published a report stating that the gap is widening for those who have to rely on benefit because benefits are not properly inflation-proof. The CPAG says that"““the lack of budget standards analysis to inform benefit rates or of a consistent approach to ensure rates keep track with changing social norms is indefensible if the safety net is intended to meet basic need and prevent poverty. The year on year degradation of benefits relative to typical wealth is part of the UK's damaging culture of inequality that must be ended.””" Again, I agree. The Select Committee argued that there was a case for targeted increases in benefits, particularly in the area of disability, to which I have referred. Poverty is, as we have said, damaging, but prices are going up for food, fuel and energy and that must be taken into account in meeting the child poverty targets. That means that the Government have to put their foot back on the accelerator and do more than they have been planning to do. I do not want to go through in detail the debacle of the abolition of the 10p tax rate; we all know what happened. I understand that it affected 5.3 million people. I am told that the Government's uprating of the tax allowance benefited some 17 million people net. Some of those—not all—will be dealing with child poverty. My concern is that that measure is for one year only—it is not recurrent—so come this time next year, those people, particularly the poorer groupings, will be plunged back into crisis. I want to use the opportunity offered by this debate to urge the Government to think again on that issue, particularly for the lower-paid, painful though that may be. Then there is the credit crunch and the risk of recession. There is the issue of stagflation as well. That could have impacts on the employment market. I am not saying that that would necessarily mean higher unemployment. The Government have done very well to buck trends and keep unemployment coming down, but there could be an impact. If that happens, the policy of pushing people into employment and getting children out of poverty will need to be rethought. If the credit crunch had such an impact, there might be areas, such as London, where that would need to be mitigated. I reiterate that there is a need for higher in-work pay and benefits. The American model of being in work and in poverty is unacceptable. The Government should make it a priority to ensure that that does not happen in this country. There need to be in-work benefits. Also important are the London living wage, a higher minimum wage and closing the gender pay gap. Those are my main points. I reiterate the case that I made in the Select Committee that tax-and-spend measures are a major issue. The Government should submit a report to Parliament on their impact on child poverty. That in itself would have a good effect.