Child Poverty Bill

I am pleased to be able to speak at this stage, although I had hoped to be able to speak to the next group of amendments. My hon. Friend the Minister mentioned the processes in the Bill for consulting those experiencing poverty, and she said that the Government had brought forward their proposal to include child care in the Bill because of its particular role in tackling child poverty. In preparation for Report, I consulted in a community in my constituency where there is a high concentration of families with children living in poverty. I talked to people about their concerns, and a key one, which led to my tabling amendment 32, which is in the next group, was the overcrowding that they experience. I hoped that that would be mentioned in the Bill. I wish to make a couple of points about the consultation, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will respond to them. When I went around the estate in Southfields, half the people I asked about their experience of poverty and the places in which they lived told me they were living in overcrowded conditions and that that was one of their prime difficulties. The feature of overcrowding that is the biggest problem to them—it is why I wanted overcrowding as well as child care, which Government amendment 21 proposes, in the Bill—is that people have to sleep in living rooms. That is a fact of material deprivation that I had hoped the Government would have taken on board and included among the indicators. May I give an example to my hon. Friend the Minister? As she will know from Committee, right back in 1935, when there was a debate about poor families, children and housing in east London, a Labour MP said""the right hon. Gentleman's standards as regards overcrowding are not"" normal. He continued:""He contemplates as a normal thing that living rooms should be used as bedrooms. I can never agree to that…in ordinary circumstances"." He went on to say that if we accept that people should be required to sleep in living rooms,""we shall be heading for the creation of new slums."—[Official Report, 20 May 1935; Vol. 302, c. 42-44.]"