Child Poverty Bill

The measures in the Bill are the most unprecedented steps towards defeating child poverty in this country ever—but, for me as an individual, no I am not satisfied. However, without measures such as the minimum wage, the new deal, Sure Start centres and much else, the incidence of child poverty would be much greater. We should judge colleagues in the House on their actions, not their words. Their voting record tells us all that we need to know about that. The truth is that we should have done more. Surely we all accept that, but by creating a statutory duty for child poverty to be effectively defeated by 2020, the Government deserve great credit. It is a bold step. I welcome it, but urge that the date be brought forward. Is it the unintentional consequence of the Bill to allow a child born today not to enjoy that right—that is what it will become under law: a right for children—until they are 11? That cannot be right. Perhaps the Minister can inform the House why 2020 has been chosen, what the next 11 years will look like, and how any potential change of Government would affect the fulfilment of that statutory obligation. Children's charities are very concerned about such a prospect. Can we also have a guarantee that the fight against child poverty will be properly resourced, irrespective of the broader economic outlook? I ask those questions because the House is very good at listening to those with a voice—victims of collapsed financial schemes, of industrial injuries and of other serious injustices—and we are always adept at listening to the media. We are adept at listening to the taxpayer and we are able to discern special interest groups when we hear them, all in the knowledge that those voices have votes. Poor children cannot vote. Their voice is usually a whisper, and evidence suggests that when—sometimes that means if—they reach adulthood, they do not vote at all. Why? Because we consign those people to the under-class—a class of people who are, as the term suggests, outside society and outside the acceptable, without a voice and living in the shadows. The journey from the maternity ward to the shadows of poverty is a quick one, and begins the second a child is born into a family living in poverty, whether their poverty is relative or absolute. I think that we can all take genuine comfort from the fact that the national health service ensures that all our children are born equal, but that equality withers the instant a child leaves hospital. This summer, I will hold a child poverty conference in my constituency. That will bring together local Sure Start centres, voluntary providers of child services, local government, social services, GPs, schools, businesses and Churches. The aim of that group will be to identify the child poverty in my constituency, its scope, location and nature, and then to develop a plan to beat it. Fundamentally, the aim is to defeat child poverty in my constituency well before 2020. It has to be this way, and I urge other hon. Members to do the same. The battle against child poverty must be fought locally; it cannot be fought solely on a national basis. There is little prospect of a lever being pulled in Whitehall that will have an instantaneous effect in my constituency. We need soft influence as well as hard influence—carrots and sticks. On soft influence, which the Secretary of State has already mentioned, I return to remarks I made at the beginning of my speech about individuals helping in their own way to create child poverty. Individuals do help to create child poverty; we in this Chamber help to do so in our communities, by ignoring both its causes and its signs. For us truly to succeed, this has to change. As significant as this legislation is, better central policy alone is not enough. More behavioural and cultural change is needed on the part of all of us if we are to prevail. It is not just the job of the teacher to identify those children in their classroom who are living in poverty. It is not just the role of the Department for Work and Pensions to identify imperilled families. That is also about the local priest who looks after an impoverished parish yet rarely sees the poor among her congregation. It is about the local councillor who sees poverty on his streets and does not shake his council into action. It is about the shopkeeper who knows he should not sell alcohol and tobacco to under-age children but turns a blind eye. It is about the police officer who picks up the same kids from the same estates for the same reasons time and again. It is about the Member of Parliament who has no affinity with his constituency, does not see the impoverished children in his area, and is either too detached, too distracted or too uninterested to solve the problem. It is about the neighbour who does not lend a hand. In short, it is about each and every one of us. We must accept that child poverty is our problem, not someone else's.