Child Poverty Bill

I have described this afternoon the investment that we are making, which is providing a record improvement in the decent homes standard. That is having a significant impact on people's standard of living. New clause 2 and amendment 23, tabled by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), suggest that regulations under the Bill should set targets on a potentially wide range of outcomes that can be said to be the causes of child poverty, and that the child poverty strategy should set out what progress needs to be made to address those causes in order to meet the targets in clauses 2 to 5. The causes of poverty drew comments from many Members in the debate, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who brought his usual compassionate and well informed perspective to bear. My right hon. Friend began by congratulating the Government on their excellent record and the scale of their ambition to tackle child poverty, but he suggested that the Government's approach had been too mechanistic. I point out to him that we are not focusing simply on incomes, taxes and benefits but, as I think he acknowledged, we are also tackling worklessness and education issues. He suggested that benefits had been increased too much compared with income, so I hope that he will welcome the better-off credit that the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced earlier. It will ensure that everybody in full-time work is better off. I remind him also of the significant reductions in the marginal deduction rates that we have recently achieved. In the discussion about the root causes of poverty, the hon. Members for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), for Upper Bann (David Simpson), for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) and for Henley (John Howell) mentioned family formation. It would not be particularly fruitful for me to detain the House on that matter for long, but I point out that it is extremely difficult to say precisely what is the correlation between family structure and poverty levels. I remind hon. Members of the experience in Denmark, which has the highest level of lone parenthood in western Europe but also comes out at the top of the UNICEF table on child well-being. The lesson that we can learn from that is that the structures and policies that we put in place are far more significant than particular matters of family formation. In any case, it is not clear that those matters are under the Government's control. Of course it is important that any Government tackle the broad range of issues and policy areas related to poverty. Clause 8 requires the UK child poverty strategy to do precisely that, but that does not mean that targets on them should be set in the Bill, as that would risk diluting the clear focus on income poverty and material deprivation that is at its heart. Such issues were debated substantially in Committee, and I refer hon. Members to the arguments that were expressed. As we said then, income poverty and material deprivation must be at the heart of the Bill because of the evidence of the impact that they have on children's lives, both in their experiences now and their chances for the future. Income poverty has an impact on children's education, health and social lives, the relationships with and between their parents and their future life chances.