Child Poverty Bill

That is a central question in this debate. If there is a goal to abolish child poverty in a meaningful sense, and benefit levels are below 60 per cent. of median, some families will always be in child poverty. Even with the most benign economic environment, significant numbers of families will probably always be on benefit. Ministers will have more accurate figures, but I suspect that the benefit level for an unemployed family with two children is not far off the 60 per cent. line. It is not implausible to think that people on basic benefit levels are just out of income poverty. The assumption that people would be in income poverty by being on benefit troubles me, and it should relate to the definition of the adequacy of benefits. I hope that the Minister will be able to give a more precise answer to that question than I can. Britain's historic record, especially in the 1980s, was shocking, but where we are now is very worrying. In the European context, we are better only than Italy, Poland and Romania. All the other 25 EU countries have better child poverty rates than we do. The goal of being about as good as the best European countries is a start, but it should not be the end of our ambitions. One of my greatest concerns is that an opportunity has been missed in the last 12 years. If we have made so little progress when the economy was doing relatively well, it will get much harder in several respects. Presumably, the first to be taken out of poverty are the low-hanging fruit—those who are only a few percentage points below the line, who are temporarily on a low income, who will find another job or who are poor for a simple, single reason rather than complex and multiple reasons. Relatively speaking, it is cheap and easy to take such people out of poverty. If we are behind schedule in the good times, what will be different about the years to 2020 that mean that we will not only catch up but accelerate our progress? If we could not achieve the goal when we had the political will and the money in the bank, when the public finances looked relatively good and the economy was growing—if all we could do was tackle the low-hanging fruit and even be behind schedule on that—is it credible that we will accelerate progress and tackle the most difficult cases when the public finances are crippled? It is an admirable goal, but do the Government believe that we will achieve it? If they do, why have we gone so slowly relative to what we need to do, given that we have been going only for the low-hanging fruit? The needs of children in poverty are complex and the policies for tackling them will be expensive; for example, complex issues arise for children in families with disabilities or for children living in care. My understanding is that children in care do not count in the figures because they do not live in households, and surveys are based on households I have no idea what the number of children in care is, although I ought to know—[Hon. Members: "Sixty thousand."] Although there are 60,000 children living in care, could we declare the problem of child poverty solved because the children are not in the survey? Is there some way of grafting them on? I appreciate that mixing and matching is tricky, but it would be an omission if we excluded children living in local authority care. Children in homeless households probably do not find their way into the surveys. In theory, a household survey can pick up a homeless household, but if people are in temporary accommodation or transient, or if they moved out between the time the survey application comes and the interviewer turns up, they would at the very least be under-represented. Might not a whole set of vulnerable children be missing from the survey? Can the Government think of a better way of including them because they are very important?