Child Poverty Bill

I am pleased to speak on this important Bill. A number of Opposition Members, especially the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), said that the Bill was an example of interference from central Government, who were constraining and placing more duties on local government. That misses the point of the Bill, as, broadly, it sets out a commitment to end child poverty, with which all Members have said they agree. The Bill sets out some targets—although not enough—to specify poverty, but leaves it to local agencies to deliver strategies to tackle poverty, which is right. Everyone who has worked on poverty understands that it requires local solutions and people and agencies to get into areas of intractable, hard-core poverty, using different strategies to tackle it and considering its specific causes in those areas. The Bill is well suited to take forward the fight against poverty. Eradicating child poverty is one of the great goals of this Government. I concede that we will miss the 2010 target, which I very much regret, but we should not ignore the progress that has been made. The Bill will move matters forward, tackling not just the financial aspects of poverty, but the other aspects to which Members have referred. I want to focus on some of those other aspects, and make some proposals to strengthen the Bill. Targeted measures, rather than blanket solutions such as general disbursal through child benefit, are necessary to target intractable, hard-core poverty. By and large, we know which families are most at risk of poverty and where they are. As several Members have said, first, they are the families in which no one works. However, the statistics also highlight the risk factors of lone parenthood, disability, unemployment in two-parent households or marginal employment in two-parent households. Those are the biggest risk factors for children to live in poverty and, according to Every Child Matters, for poor outcomes for children. Poor families can also be identified by the state benefits they receive, especially income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit, with disability benefits a bit further down the scale. We also know where poor families live, and that has changed over time in an interesting way. In 1970, poor families were most likely to be renting private property, with only a third in social housing. By 2000, the figures were almost exactly reversed, with poor people three times more likely to be social housing tenants. Now, the figures have shifted again. The biggest proportion of poor families are tenants of the state, renting social housing split between council housing and housing association properties. However, the next biggest category of poor people live in owner-occupied housing. The size of that category might increase as a result of the current recession, and the Government might need policy instruments to tackle it.