Child Poverty Bill

The difficulty towards the end of such a debate is that many of the points that one wished to raise have already been raised. However, some of the issues that I want to raise may run counter to those made in many of the speeches in this debate. First, I welcome the objectives of the Bill. We have had a good run-through this evening of the impacts that child poverty has on children throughout the United Kingdom and the consequences for society in lost opportunities, crime, problems in later life and so on. However, I am not so sure that the approach taken in the Bill is necessarily a good way of dealing with the issue. Hon. Members have drawn parallels between this Bill and the Climate Change Act 2008—some people may know my views on that—under which long-term targets have been set. Those targets will span not just this Administration, but another Administration and perhaps another one after that. At the end, nobody will be held responsible for targets that may be set 10 or 20 years in advance. To throw in a commission in order to try to provide some continuity is something that I am not so sure about—and I will come to the commission in a moment. I am not sure that the approach that we are debating is necessarily the best way forward. Secondly, let us introduce a bit of realism. Hon. Members have already made the point that the issue should not be about simply scoring political points off the Government who happen to have responsibility for taking through legislation and public policy at the moment. However, even with their commitment to reaching their target of reducing child poverty by 50 per cent., this Government were unable to achieve their targets during the best of economic times. At a time when employment was riding high and public finances were abundant, those targets were not met. This Bill is being introduced in the context of immense pressure on public sector finances, with a period of rising unemployment and the impact of other policies. For example, last week the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced a policy that will add, some believe, £230 a year to households' energy bills. We must therefore be realistic when we set these targets. We must not create an expectation that we can meet a target that we were unable to meet in the good circumstances, because we are unlikely to be able to meet it in the circumstances that we will face in future. I take issue with the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who used the word "slipperiness" in referring to the clause saying that economic and financial circumstances should be taken into consideration. To a certain extent, that is simply being sensible. We are looking at a policy that will apply that far ahead and in circumstances that we cannot possibly foresee and unless we skew all the other policies around it, we must have some way of evaluating the targets that we are aiming for but that circumstances might prevent us from achieving. My next point flows from that. There is an obligation on devolved Administrations to bring forward a strategic plan for dealing with this issue. I take the point that it is not simply about levels of income. Perhaps the Bill focuses too much on that, although, to be fair to the Government, the guidance that they have given goes much wider to include housing, education and a range of other things. However, there will still be resource implications that vary across different parts of the country. In some places there will be deeper deprivation, and therefore a greater problem, than in others; the causes of poverty might be much more expensive to deal with than elsewhere. Without the commitment of resources—I am thinking particularly of devolved Administrations such as Northern Ireland, where, given the higher levels of deprivation and child poverty, there are greater consequences in dealing with this—we will not meet the targets for 2010 that we had hoped to meet. Only last week, the House of Lords indicated—the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) will not like to hear this—that Wales and Northern Ireland have lost out on the Barnett formula. As a result, the resources that have been made available are less than what is required to bring Northern Ireland up to the levels that would give us greater equality with the rest of the United Kingdom. Some Members have asked how, if the money available through the Barnett funding mechanism is not ring-fenced, we can be sure that it will be spent on these issues. However, the fact that the child poverty strategy has been brought forward indicates that the necessary resources have to be directed towards dealing with it. I am not sure I agree with criticisms of other aspects of the Bill. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said that the strategy for dealing with these issues would be imposed on, or left to, local councils as the deliverers in England, and that there would be disadvantages to that. Given the different circumstances in different parts of the United Kingdom, that degree of flexibility for local councils or devolved Administrations to bring forward their own strategies is a good part of the Bill. Administrations are guided towards certain areas, but some will have different emphases. In rural areas, for example, the issues of poverty might be much different from those in inner-city areas. Giving the responsibility to local authorities or devolved Administrations to draft their own strategies rather than having them imposed from the centre is, I believe, a good idea. Let me consider the circumstances in Northern Ireland. One thing that helps to release people from poverty—it has been mentioned tonight—is a good sound education and once we had a devolved Administration in Northern Ireland, we moved away from the policy that the Government were introducing of doing away with grammar schools in Northern Ireland. We believed that grammar schools were one way of giving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity to climb the ladder out of that background and impoverishment. When it comes to the delivery of some of the programmes, especially those that offer help with families that have difficulties or that are dysfunctional, Churches in Northern Ireland could have a huge input—and perhaps more so than in other parts of the United Kingdom. A strategy that recognises such opportunities and their strengths should be within the remit of the local administration. That flexibility is good, and we should turn our backs on it. My last point concerns the need for the commission. Its role is to provide the data, to scrutinise and evaluate the policy, to carry out research into child poverty and to have the expertise in dealing with families that experience poverty and so on. We are told that it will not cost very much. We have not even got the Bill through and groups are already saying that the commission is under-resourced and should have more. Let us face it—once such an organisation is set up, the impetus is always for it to be expanded into a bigger bureaucracy and a bigger quango, not shrunk. As the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, the real place where the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of this policy should be undertaken is Parliament. This is where Ministers should be brought to account, whether through Select Committees or in annual debates in the House. This—not some quango—is the place for such scrutiny. Of course, quangos often take on a life of their own anyway. Few quangos vote, or produce reports, to say that they are no longer needed. They always find some reason for their continued existence. I have heard so many times in this House that we have to reduce the cost of government. However, it seems that on almost every occasion when we come forward with some new ideas or policies to deal with a particular problem, we set up more extra-parliamentary bodies. I believe that that is the wrong way forward. I look forward to Committee. I know that the devolved Administration in Northern Ireland will be actively involved in considering a strategy for dealing with child poverty, which will have to cross all the various Departments within that Administration. I hope that where resources are required centrally for that strategy, they will be made available.