Child Poverty Bill

In speaking to this group of amendments, I hope to achieve two objectives. The first is to praise the Government for their determination in setting the objective in the Bill. It is an audacious thing to do, and I do not want the debate to pass without that being said. However, I also wish to raise some questions about the balance of the Government's approach, not in the Bill but up to this point in their campaign to abolish child poverty. I shall question whether they have been far too mechanical in seeing the solution as coming largely from benefits rather than through trying to balance people's immediate need for more money with an examination of the long-term causes of poverty. I take new clause 2 to be about that matter. First, on a point of congratulation, no Government in the post-war period, or indeed ever, have set the objective of abolishing poverty in the way that this Government have. At the time they set that objective, I was Minister with responsibility for welfare reform, but I learned about it from a television broadcast. That suggested something about the relationship between the two powers in Downing street and the rest of the Administration, but I was pleased to read more recently that No. 11 was not even consulted before the objective was set in the famous Toynbee Hall speech by the then Prime Minister. The objective certainly marked this Government out from previous ones, but for most of our stewardship we have thought of poverty—naturally enough—in material terms, and of solutions in money terms. Therefore, the whole effort of the Government's engineering at the bottom of the income scale has been to raise benefit levels disproportionately to other incomes, so that one took children and their families across a poverty line. As far as one's first moral responsibility of helping the poor goes, who could fault the Government on that? However, at least two things have happened since. First, the money has run out, even though the Chancellor was not too willing to admit that in his earlier statement, and perhaps he will not do so for another year. Secondly, the Government have engaged in the debate in a very responsible way, taking that crude initiative and broadening it out. One sees that in the Bill. It is about not only money, but what some of us in the House would refer to as causes. Although I have not participated in a debate on the Bill before, I have read reports of them, and I have been struck by how they have been captured by Seebohm Rowntree. He was the chocolate manufacturer's son—his father, Joseph Rowntree, made his name building up that great firm in York and elsewhere. His son made his name—