Child Poverty Bill

I do not think that anyone sensible could doubt that growing up in a stable relationship gives a child the best possible start in life. However, I do wonder, given the push towards marriage being reasserted by those on the Opposition Benches, why, when they were in government, they scaled down the married person's tax allowance to the point of its virtual disappearance. There is a little hypocrisy in their position. We want to promote stable relationships, and marriage is obviously a critical, but not the only, way of providing a child with a stable life. We need, above all, as the Government have done—and as, in practice, the Opposition were moving towards—to direct resources towards the child rather than worry too much about the exact status of the relationship in which the child is growing up. I want to lay to rest some myths, the first of which is the idea that one can tackle child poverty without money. Its causes are complex and multifaceted, and we need to look at education, relationships and so forth to deal with them, but we will lift people out of poverty by making sure that they have more money. It is a no-brainer, but unfortunately I hear the Conservative party propagating the myth that we can tackle child poverty without money. It is extremely worrying that we believe that simply driving parents into employment without ensuring that that work pays will somehow tackle poverty—it will not. It will simply move a parent from out-of-work poverty to in-work poverty, and quite possibly deepen their poverty because of the costs that they will have to deal with. There is also the myth that we can achieve everything that we want to achieve through local delivery rather than with national Government. Ending child poverty is a national Government responsibility. It requires the active participation of local authorities, but I say to Conservative Members that it is striking that my local authority, a flagship Conservative-controlled authority, did not mention the word "poverty" for 11 and a half years, until the Government offered it some money to deliver pilot work on reducing child poverty, whereupon it took the money and is now, I have to say, doing some very solid work on it. However, it has taken—and will continue to take—national direction to deliver that work. Having defended the Government from what is an admittedly reasonably easy target—the official Opposition —I must say that it is a grave disappointment that we have flatlined following the progress made between 1999 and 2006, with even a slight deterioration in the situation recently, despite the welcome addition of around £2 billion of extra investment in the 2006-07 Budgets, some of which is still to come through. We have an interim target for 2010, which we will clearly not reach, but there is no reason for not recommitting ourselves to reaching it as soon as possible: the fact that we will not hit the target in 2010 does not mean that we cannot hit it in 2011. We do not want a target for 2020 to take total precedence over interim measures. Similar concerns were raised in relation to the Climate Change Act 2008 about not allowing long-term perfection to drive out the messier and less perfect but none the less very important interim objectives. My right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary has done a great deal on this issue in his ministerial capacity and he knows that London is at the heart of much of our dilemma in reaching the child poverty objective. London has not made progress—in fact, if London had made the same progress as the rest of the country has, we would be hitting our lone parent employment targets and would be well on the way to hitting our child poverty target. London's experience has clearly demonstrated that incentives work in getting parents into employment and helping them to earn money and lift themselves above the poverty target. Incentives have worked in every other part of the country. The tax credit system has delivered lone parent employment levels and reduced child poverty, but it has not worked in London. Why not? Work incentives, as delivered through the tax credit system, do not deliver in London because our costs are so much higher. We pretty well know what works. The London child poverty commission does not have a huge intellectual task ahead of it. We know what works: incentives into employment work, as does the delivery of affordable, quality child care. Again, it is a no-brainer. The problem is not about thinking up new ideas, but about delivering on them. That cannot be done for free, despite the assumptions made by the Opposition. I want to finish by spending a minute or two on something about which we did not hear much from Ministers but about which I would like to hear more in the winding-up speech and in Committee. None of us has done a terribly good job at convincing the public of the need to tackle child poverty. The most fascinating Joseph Rowntree Foundation report—it is also the one that deserves the closest scrutiny by Ministers—is the one that looks at attitudes to child poverty. There is a general assumption among the public that the word "poverty" is associated with individual failure and, effectively, laziness. In part, that is obviously to do with the abstraction of the word "poverty", which people do not like, but when they are confronted with it as a concept, there is a general willingness to believe that people are the architects of their own inadequacy and poverty. In large part, that is explained by the low awareness in the public mind of such elements as average income. I do not know whether any hon. Member in the Chamber has ever taken it, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies has a test on its website that asks people to place themselves on an income scale. I am sure that all hon. Members know only too well where they are on the income scale, but most people phenomenally underestimate where they stand on the scale—the IFS has applied the test to groups of civil servants in particular. Most people think that they are average earners, but actually—oh boy—we are not. We are very high earners indeed, while the overwhelming majority of people who take the test find that they are much higher on the income scale than they expected. People do not understand just how low the incomes that people on low incomes are, nor do they fully understand, when they are earning, just how low benefits are. Above all, they do not understand—this point was made in an earlier intervention—that half of all households in poverty contain at least one person who is in work. As long as we have a public assumption that poverty is associated with out-of-work benefit-dependency, we will have our work cut out in winning public support for what needs to be done. Does it matter whether we have public support? It matters hugely, because we have a moral commitment—I would say that we all have that commitment, in all parts of the House—not to leave children behind in this, the fourth largest economy in the world. It also matters a great deal whether we have public support because poverty costs this country a great deal. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the cost to the British economy of maintaining high levels of child poverty is around £25 billion, while 1 to 1.8 per cent. of GDP could be saved by lifting children out of poverty. There is therefore a powerful economic case. I am sure that hon. Members in all parts of the House would accept that long-term poverty and inequality not only are an economic drag on this country, but take their toll on the wider economy and society.