Child Poverty Bill

As always, it is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and, indeed, the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who ably introduced new clause 1. As the hon. Gentleman said, we touched on this issue in Committee and I understand where he is coming from. Indeed, in Committee I made the point that families are primarily interested in the after housing costs income—how much money they have left to spend on food, clothing, transport and so on, to balance the weekly budget. That is the critical amount for many families. We do track that figure. In Prime Minister's questions earlier, the figure of 4 million children living in poverty was mentioned, and that is the after housing cost figure, rather than the before housing cost figure of 2.9 million. In Committee, my hon. Friends and I backed amendment 28, tabled by the hon. Gentleman, which would have removed clause 6(2) which prevents housing costs from being deducted when calculating the net income of a household. We thought that that was overly prescriptive because it would tie the hands of the Child Poverty Commission, which has not even been set up yet, when it came to take a view on housing costs. We were happy to back the hon. Gentleman on that amendment. As the hon. Gentleman has made clear, the households below average income series already publishes the figures for both before and after housing costs, and it will continue to do so. The Minister made that clear. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we will pay careful attention to the after housing costs figure. At 4 million, it is much higher than any of us would like. My concern about supporting new clause 1 is that we already have four income targets in the Bill, as I said in Committee. I was grateful for the comments by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead when he talked of the importance of widening out the range of indicators and targets that we use to track our progress in reducing poverty, which will of course always be measured in income terms. We should have a range of targets in the Bill that drive policy in the right direction. My concern about new clause 1 is that that fifth income target would focus more on downstream intervention, whereas the real need is to focus on the root causes of poverty—those factors that trap people in a life of poverty, about which the right hon. Gentleman rightly talked. In that respect, I tabled new clause 2 and amendments 23 and 24. New clause 2 seeks to add a fifth target to the Bill, just as the hon. Member for Northavon has tried to do, that would deal specifically with reducing the causes of poverty. I tabled a similar amendment in Committee and made an attempt to put some detail in the clause. Other members of the Committee said, "Well, you have included this, but you have left out that, and we do not think that that's very good." I took that point. I accept that the new clause is relatively brief at the moment, but amendment 23 specifies that the actual causes of poverty would be specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State. That is clearly something that the Child Poverty Commission, among others, would have a view on, and it would advise the Government. I think that that measure is essential. Indeed, my overriding criticism of the Bill is that it focuses purely on downstream income intervention and does not do enough at an early enough stage to address the causes of poverty. I am supported in that point by several commentators, not least by witnesses at the formal evidence sessions in Committee. For example, both Mike Brewer of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Donald Hirsch, a well respected academic from the university of Loughborough, were asked whether the Bill needs to address the longer-term causes of poverty in the early years, and they both said yes. Mike Brewer said:""I wish that there were a broader range of indicators"." That is precisely what new clause 2 is seeking to introduce. Neil O'Brien, another witness from Policy Exchange, spoke about the current set of targets driving public policy to""relentlessly...downstream intervention to give people income, rather than...tackle the causes."" He spoke of it being necessary to align""your targets to your broader strategy".——[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 101-104, Q199 and 203.]" That is the central point. The Department for Work and Pensions used to go some way along those lines. In its excellent "Opportunity for All" report, it published details of the number of children in workless households, teenage pregnancy, the proportion of children in disadvantaged areas with a good level of development, the number of children not in education, employment or training, childhood obesity and other such factors. Bizarrely, it stopped producing that report in 2007. I quoted Mike Brewer's evidence to the Committee, but he has not stopped considering the point. In a recent article entitled "What's the point of the Child Poverty Bill?", he wrote that""in my mind, the worrying aspect of the Bill is that it highlights income-based measures of child poverty over all other possible measures of child well-being. Although the Bill says that a government strategy must tackle socio-economic disadvantage amongst children, the way we will know whether child poverty is eradicated in 2020 will be determined by four measures of income poverty."" He also points out that""there is a risk that politicians will always favour policy responses with immediate and predictable impacts on the incomes of parents over responses which mitigate the impact of poverty on children, or improve poor children's well-being, or reduce the intergenerational transmission of child poverty (such as measures to tackle low achievement amongst white boys in receipt of free school meals, whose results at Key Stage 2 were recently revealed to be lower than all other ethnic groups).""