Child Poverty Bill

No, I want to make some more progress. As it happens, I was about to come to the fact that work provides the only sustainable route out of poverty, which is why it is important to understand that child poverty is parental poverty as well. I am disappointed that the Bill does not give greater attention to the importance of business and economic regeneration. It says little about local enterprise, but that must be a key part of any local partnerships to tackle poverty. We have not begun to tackle the problem of worklessness in this country. We went into the recession with nearly 5 million people claiming some form of out-of-work benefit. Despite one of the most sustained periods of economic growth in our history, hardly a dent has been made on the hard core of welfare dependency, and we are now seeing record rises in unemployment. Worklessness and benefit dependency put children and young people at risk of a cycle of poverty, yet Britain has a higher proportion of children living in workless households than any other EU country. The figures show why that is so serious: in households in which all the adults work, a child has only an 8 per cent. chance of being in poverty; in households in which no adults work, that figure rises to 61 per cent. Even the initial progress in reducing child poverty occurred not because of success in tackling high levels of worklessness; one recent report has shown that the number of children living in households in poverty—or those that would be in poverty without tax credits—has increased by nearly 1 million under Labour. Of course, tax credits have been a means of helping the poorest families. However, as the Government now accept, a strategy that relies solely on tax credits, without getting people into work, is not sustainable. Worse, such an approach undermines incentives to work.