Child Poverty Bill

It is certainly true that the UK has a very poor record on child poverty compared with most of the rest of the European Union, and I shall discuss that later. Our record has got progressively worse over the past 20 to 30 years, although at least some welcome efforts have been made to reverse the situation in the past decade or so. The extent of child poverty in this country is internationally embarrassing. I hope that the House will forgive me for being autobiographical for a moment—I am not referring to my own poor childhood, but to my career prior to coming into this House. My first job was working at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose work has been cited on a number of occasions during this debate. In the nine years I was there, my entire research was on poverty and child poverty, and the measurement of it. Although I was working for an avowedly non-party political think tank—I had to leave it when I was selected as a parliamentary candidate to help preserve its party political neutrality—monitoring poverty under the previous Conservative Government during the late 1980s and early 1990s was, over many years, a profoundly politicising piece of work. I say that because we would update the figures each year, check the relevant Department's figures and monitor trends in child poverty and find that year after year the level of child poverty would remorselessly grow. A majority of people would do relatively well, enjoying tax cuts, and the people at the top would do exceptionally well, but year after year more and more children would find themselves in poverty. One of the things that caused me to cease being an even-handed academic and to want to engage in the political process was the fact that I was appalled at what was happening in our country to the most vulnerable people. Some people did very well in the late 1980s, but children in poverty did not. Therefore, this is a Bill that could never have been brought forward by a Conservative Government, because they stood idly by and watched child poverty reach record levels. To hear Conservative Front Benchers suggest that they even care about this subject, and that it would be some sort of priority, is frankly unbelievable. People are judged by what they do when they have the chance to do something, and, in 18 years, there was at best benign neglect and, in some cases, policies that actively made matters worse. We have heard of the freezing of child benefit, and I would add to the list the abolition of grants for essential items for lone parents on benefit, and their replacement with repayable loans from the social fund, which had to be paid back out of inadequate benefits. Under those reforms, people could get to the point at which they were too poor to qualify even for a loan. The Conservative party said that poor families were getting too much help through the grant system, and replaced it with repayable loans that had a threshold that meant that people could be too poor to be entitled to help. That is what happens when the Conservatives' priorities are put into practice. That is one reason why I welcome the framework of this Bill, the 2020 target and the commission. There has been a spurious suggestion that there will be a vast, sprawling quango that will rob the public purse of money. In fact, the estimated cost of this new body is £20,000 for a dozen people to come together four times a year to discuss the issue, with two civil servants working on it. In the context of one of the biggest social problems of our age, that is a tiny amount of money. If this is one of the quangos that the shadow Secretary of State suggests would be abolished by a new Conservative Government, I would like to know what she would put in its place.