Child Poverty Bill

Of course it is. One thing Seebohm Rowntree did was list the issues that the Government are trying to deal with in the Bill—in a sense, that underpins new clause 1 and the whole of the Government's approach. At the turn of the last century, he asked why people were poor. He listed low pay, being a single-parent household, unemployment, sickness and old age, but he went on to say that one should not read such things as the causes of poverty, and that they are in fact manifestations of poverty. He said that if we want to look at the causes of poverty, we have to go much deeper into the big questions about political economy. Therefore, I much welcome the fact that when the Government started to fan out in the Bill how they view poverty, they got on to what I think we need to get on to—namely, looking at the deep, root causes of poverty in our society, with which amendments in this group deal. Indeed, I would argue that it is inconsistent for the Government to adopt such an approach to defining poverty and not to welcome the debate about the link between children in poverty and one-parent households—Labour Members find it easier to link low pay in such households to children in poverty. There seems to be something inconsistent about our approach. We are not prepared to try to teach the nation that if one becomes a single-parent, or makes little opportunity of the 13 years of state investment in education and goes into an unskilled job, the probability is that one will be poor. I was therefore disturbed that, when in the past couple of days the Leader of the Opposition raised the question—he did so very carefully—of eliminating the discrimination against two-parent families, it was immediately read by some of the single-parent groups as an attack on the status of single parents. I know they have grounds for doing so, because when we were first elected in '97, we said we were going to abolish such discrimination, but we foolishly presented that in terms of attacking single parents and reducing their income. However, the proposals I mentioned were not to reduce the income of single-parent households, but to raise the income of households with two parents. In that way, the children in such households would be equivalent to children in households in which only one parent earned. I rose to congratulate the Government on distinguishing themselves as the first ever who decided they could, by their means, change whether people lived in households in poverty. Secondly, I rose to congratulate the Government on broadening how they see the mechanisms by which poverty is transmitted. They have moved—thank goodness—from a rather crude definition and from concern only in money terms, and are beginning to look at the debate about the root causes of poverty, which I think we need to have in what remains of this Parliament and in the next. That is why the Government's proposals for raising the performance of our secondary schools are so important. We need to guarantee that practically every child leaves with minimum school-leaving requirements. Those requirements should not be made up by adding slightly bogus vocational qualifications to five GCSEs including English and maths. In the hard world in which the employer interprets such qualifications, children who have them will probably be condemned to poverty in adulthood, and their children with them. I also believe that we need to get over to younger people that opting for single parenthood is not a desirable life choice. Many have that inflicted upon them, but the way we allow young people to make that decision without spelling out what it means for them and their life chances, and more importantly for their children's life chances, fails that next generation. It is not good enough for the pressure groups to wheel out upper-middle class young single parents who are having a whale of a time and saying, "I'm so pleased I'm a young single parent. I can't tell you all the choices I have now I've got all that over with," and the rest of it. The young women who follow that model in my constituency do not have the bank balances to see them through. I affirm my congratulations to the Government on their long period of stewardship and on staying with this issue. Perhaps a little later than I would have thought, they have widened the debate beyond what Rowntree thought were the superficial causes to the root causes of poverty, which I welcome. I put that down as a marker for the next Parliament—hopefully some of us will be returned by the electorate. The Government made their choice at a time of record public expenditure. In the next Parliament, there will be record cuts in public expenditure. As Tawney said, when the great liners go down, who gets into the lifeboats is important. It is important for us to help to shape the debate about the priorities and to decide who gets into those lifeboats when the age of big cuts in public expenditure is really upon us.