Deprivation/Child Poverty

I am sorry. ““Breakdown Britain”” is a term that I have in this context, but I do not believe that it is an accurate description of what has happened in the UK. It is dangerous—the hon. Gentleman did not fall prey to that danger, but his party needs to be careful about it—to argue, as the shadow Minister has certainly done, that the problem is not about money. That takes us back to the position of the last Conservative Government, under which child poverty doubled to the highest rate in Europe. We still have some way to go to recover from that, and tackling child poverty requires serious investment of the sort announced in the previous couple of Budgets and the pre-Budget reports. We all need to square up to that. It is fair to raise other issues and concerns about what is happening in families, but that must be in addition to addressing the financial aspects of poverty, not instead of that. The hon. Gentleman made a point about reducing the marginal rate of benefit withdrawal, and we all understand why that is attractive, but the consequences would be either significantly greater costs and extending access to tax credits much further up the income scale—I thought that the Conservative party opposed that—or scaling the system back and leaving people a great deal worse off. There is not a straightforward solution. I do not know which view the hon. Gentleman favours. Reducing the marginal rate of benefit is attractive in theory, but there are many questions about how that could be done.