Child Poverty Bill

My hon. Friend served with great distinction in Committee, and it is excellent to see him in the Chamber. He has a point. It worries me a little when I hear Ministers saying, "We have raised 500,000 people"—or however many—"out of poverty." I take the example of a household that has been nudged from, say, 58 to 61 per cent. of median income. Imagine knocking on the door of that household and asking, "What does it feel like to be out of poverty?" That might be a harsh analogy because I realise that we will always need a target, that it will involve a line and that crossing it will bring only slight differences. However, my general point is that we could visit that household that is just above the poverty threshold and find that things had not really changed. I believe that the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) talked about the culture of poverty in his excellent contributions in Committee, and I think that he has a sense of where I am coming from. I hope to press new clause 2 to a Division, and the same goes for new clause 3, if time permits—although I realise that it might not. There is a serious point behind new clause 3. It would put the much easier 2010-11 target to halve the original rate of child poverty by 2010-11 on a statutory basis. I was grateful to the hon. Member for Northavon and his colleagues in Committee for supporting us on that. I look forward to their support if we can press new clause 3 to a Division. As I said, there is a serious point behind the new clause. We are not just playing politics. All the commentators think it unlikely that we will meet the target. In the light of the pre-Budget report, will the Minister tell the House how many additional children will be brought out of child poverty? I am looking at the section in the report on supporting families to reduce child poverty, on page 81, but that number is not leaping out at me. Perhaps she will enlighten the House in her response. Interestingly, it has been 10 years, virtually to the day, since the then Chancellor of the Exchequer—the current Prime Minister—committed the Government, in the pre-Budget report on 9 November 1999, to the intermediate goal, as I think it was described, of halving child poverty by 2010. We have had 10 years, almost to the day, of trying to meet the 2010 target. New clause 3 would provide great value by ensuring that the relevant Secretary of State—I understand from Committee proceedings that it would be the Chancellor—comes to the Dispatch Box and explains why the 2010 target of halving child poverty has not been achieved, because, frankly, after today it is not going to be achieved, and then, importantly, how the policy will change, what additional things will be done in our schools and skills training, and how we can strengthen families throughout the length and breadth of the nation. That would give us an early opportunity to learn the lessons on how we need to tweak policy to make further progress. That is the point. If we continue with the current rate of progress, with the strategy that the Government have had in place since 1999, we will not have a chance of meeting the 2020 target, which everyone in the House, I believe, wants to see achieved.