Child Poverty Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). He said that this should not be a partisan debate. Apart from some of the usual political banter earlier in the day, I think that Members on both sides of the House have treated this as a serious issue on which we want to move forward. Unfortunately, however, the Bill is very much about setting targets rather than delivering an end to child poverty. A few Members have talked about the great progress that has already been made, but we are where we are, and, in regard to where we stand in Europe, that is not a great place to be. My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) mentioned that child poverty rates in the UK were below those of Poland, Italy and Romania. I do not have his encyclopaedic knowledge—which he gained from working for the Institute for Fiscal Studies for nine years—but I think that it is worth putting on record which European countries we are behind in this regard. We are behind Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Cyprus, Iceland, Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belgium, Estonia, Malta, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Lithuania, Greece and Spain. So, when people say that we have made great strides in years gone by, we must remember that we are still not where we want to be. I see pockets of poverty in my constituency, which is generally viewed, like those of many other Members, as a relatively wealthy one. It is sad to say that in my eight years as a Member, nobody has ever come to my surgery to ask about child poverty. People come along to say that they have problems with their benefits, tax credits or whatever, but nobody has told me, "You must deal with the issues of child poverty". It is the same with housing problems in that very few come along to say, "Housing is a major problem and we want to see Parliament do something to sort out the wider problem." As I have said, the Bill deals with targets, but there is a great shortage of specific detail and no specific strategy. As the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) said, it is very easy to set targets for issues such as the millennium development goals. We all heard pledges made when the G8 met at Gleneagles a number of years ago. Earlier this year, the G8 met again in Italy and some of those who had made significant pledges at Gleneagles were there calling for action to happen, but those very same people had not delivered on their own pledges. We must expect promises to be kept generally, but for those suffering from poverty, those promises can be the very heart of their lives. People often say that it is not just a question of money or cash in pockets, as there are many other aspects to living in poverty. One particular issue that I want to highlight today is that Government targets on child poverty will never be achieved without a specific focus on disability. I am going to come back to that. There are a wide range of issues involved, but I shall try not to repeat those previously mentioned. As a number of Members have said, education also has a key role in pulling people out of poverty. There are two spirals that work with education—an upward and a downward spiral. People who have good jobs and a good income often see their children having a good education. Those children will come out of school, secure a good job and carry on in that upward spiral. At the same time, the children who grow up in poverty often suffer from a poorer education; they will end up in lower-paid jobs and the downward spiral will continue for them. Although we have legislation before us—I welcome the fact of this Bill—it will not end child poverty. I accept that some Members care less than others about poverty, but I would like to think that everybody cared about poverty, even though they might not have suffered from it themselves. I do not believe that someone has to rob a bank to know that doing so is wrong. Equally, we do not have to be poor in order to feel the pain of those who are living in deep poverty. We see in our surgeries how issues have developed over the years. On the good side, child poverty will be at the heart of every party's manifesto in the run-up to the next general election, which is 12 months away. We have moved on, because child poverty did not merit a mention at all in the Labour party's 1997 manifesto. It was a couple of years later before child poverty came up on the agenda and targets were set, only some of which have been met. The Government have achieved some positive things—tax credits, for example, but there are both good and bad sides to them. There have been errors and reclaims that have caused great confusion. Even worse for people, we are now in a recession, with increasing unemployment. Although the Secretary of State announced today a further £10 million to tackle poverty, we have seen tens of billions of pounds pumped into the banking system to ensure that it can carry on working. As we heard in an announcement last week, several thousand bankers received bonuses in excess of £500,000 each, at the same time as many people in the UK were living on the breadline. There is no lack of wealth in this country: if only we could get it right—whether it be through legislation, education, employment, transport, housing or a whole range of other issues—we could tackle the poverty that still exists in too many pockets of the UK. A number of provisions in the Bill detail the role of local authorities and devolved Governments and Assemblies. I shall raise one issue, on which I expect the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) to strike back. Problems can be identified at the UK level, as they were some years ago when the UK Government specified that about £300 million needed to be spent in support of disabled children. That went through the Barnett formula, but when £34 million went to the Scottish Government, the money was not spent on that purpose. It was spent on other issues, not on the specific need identified by the UK Government. It is the same with child poverty. There are clear issues that run UK-wide, but when responsibilities are passed to local authorities, Governments and Assemblies, it is sometimes a case of passing the buck, while at other times those bodies just do not deliver. I believe that the responsibility lies at the UK level to see that child poverty is tackled at the UK level. I am now going to focus specifically on child poverty in relation to disability. Unless the Bill is disabled-aware, the significant costs associated with living with a disabled child for families and parents who are sometimes themselves disabled will not be understood. So many factors work together that result in children ending up in poverty. It is well known that those who are disabled are less likely to be in work, but more likely to want to work, than their able-bodied counterparts. A household with disabled children will end up with higher weekly running costs—often higher transport costs, sometimes higher food costs because of specific diets that are required and a whole range of other costs. At the same time, however, their income is likely to be lower. A few facts are worth reading into the record. One in three of all children living in poverty have at least one disabled parent. A family with one disabled parent is 30 per cent. more likely to be in poverty, and 700,000 children with a disabled parent are living in poverty. Families with disabled children are more than 50 per cent. more likely to be in debt, while 16 per cent. of mothers with disabled children work in comparison with 62 per cent. of mothers with non-disabled children. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon said, there is often a real disparity when extra income or benefits are taken into account. Those increases do not result in those families being better off; they are simply there to deal with the increased costs that the families have to deal with. The Government often respond by saying that they target means-tested benefits to those who are the poorest of the poor, but the poorest of the poor are not necessarily those entitled to and receiving benefits. The real poorest of the poor—this is where poverty is a real problem—are those who are entitled to, but do not receive, those benefits. As I said to the Secretary of State earlier, £10 billion of means-tested benefits went unclaimed this year.