Child Poverty Bill

I will be mercifully brief. I want to raise a number of points in support of new clauses 3 and 2. As most colleagues will know, I spent quite a lot of time on the international development brief in the 1990s, when we were pursuing the 2015 millennium development goals. They were set in the early 1990s, when giving 10, 15 or 20 years to achieve them seemed a perfectly reasonable and commendable thing to do. Everyone thought that that was exactly the right way forward. As it turned out, the closer we get, the more we realise we are a long way from achieving those goals. With hindsight, it would have been far better to build in more immediate, intermediate goals as we walked along that journey, to ensure that we were moving in the right direction and testing ourselves. That is why I support new clause 3. We have had the Government target, but new clause 3 talks about not just an immediate target for 2010 in this Bill, but being very specific indeed about what is achieved through that target. I said this on Second Reading, but putting in place a target and setting up a commission are not substitutes for a proper, well thought through and developed strategy for hitting such targets and delivering on the issue that we are all concerned about—there is no one in the House who does not want to reduce child poverty, however it is defined. If we are serious, there is an argument for restructuring the machinery of government, rather than just setting up a commission and setting a target, so that many existing Departments are better placed to bear down on the problem. I sit on the Select Committee on Home Affairs. Yesterday we heard evidence from the former drugs tsar, Mr. Hellawell. He talked about his time as someone brought in from the outside to take overall responsibility of the drugs strategy in the United Kingdom, and about the difficulty of getting all Departments co-ordinated and in alignment to bear down on the drugs problem. If we genuinely believe that child poverty in this country should be a huge focus for the Government and if we would all like it to be significantly reduced, there is an argument for restructuring the machinery of government to bear down on the problem, and not just setting a target or establishing a commission. I hope that the House will seriously consider agreeing to new clause 3, and if not, to something like it, to ensure that we do not just set waffly old goals, but put down, on the record, achievable targets and stepping stones towards achieving them in the mean time. New clause 2 talks about the causes of poverty, which resonates greatly with the former Prime Minister's talk about being "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Of course we would like to be tough on the causes of poverty, but what are they? I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and wondered whether it was possible for us to agree as a House on what the causes of poverty might be. For example, what part do human nature and the choices that we make individually play in the causes of poverty? We have all observed, in our lives and in our constituencies over the years, people in similar circumstances and from similar backgrounds making different choices, with some flourishing and others ending up in deprivation and poverty. To what extent can one factor in those individual choices that are a reflection of individual human nature? Perhaps that is utterly impossible. Ill health is also a cause of poverty. We have all known families who have been going along very nicely indeed, when the primary breadwinner—or perhaps both parents or a child—sadly becomes ill and the money stops flowing, causing disruption and poverty. Family breakdown, drug addiction and alcohol dependency, which my hon. Friend mentioned, and poor education—all these things can be causes of poverty.