Child Poverty Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, because his experience is valuable and he made an interesting speech, which I am sure will repay careful study. I absolutely agree with his final point about co-operating across parties to try to achieve this end. There is no purpose in point-scoring; it is too serious a subject for that. I will say two other things about his speech. First, he was interested in moving mountains. It is a long time since 1999 and we are still floundering in the foothills. Expectations have been dashed. It was a brave vision and the then Prime Minister was probably right to set out that vision, but we still have a long way to go. What worries me more than anything else about that is that the earliest reductions are the easiest to achieve. The hardest bit is yet to come. The last 10 years will be harder than the first 10 years. I think everybody understands that. Against a background of climate change, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer making statements yesterday about how growth will be devoted to fiscal consolidation, it is not surprising that people are worried about where resources will come from. He made a powerful point about the need for extra resources, and I agree with that. He also made an important point about best practice. Actually, we have been too dependent in the past on American practice. We should be looking much more to our sister European countries for some of the ideas that we might need to innovate in the 10 years remaining if we are to be successful. People are right to be less than enthusiastic about where we are. The Minister probably has the argument on points, but I would not put it any higher than that. The debate has been interesting and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that it is always massively instructive to listen to colleagues because there is such a range of experience and different points of view. I will respond to some of them from my own perspective. I said that noble Lords were reflecting disappointment in urging the Government to do more. There is nothing new in this Bill. Nothing will be different after it is passed. I say that as someone who has watched this argument from the Beveridge lecture in 1999. I was one whose jaw dropped when the commitment was made. Since then, there has been a huge amount of activity in terms of developing the policy such as in the 2004 Child Poverty Review, which was a substantial Treasury document. In 2006, we had Lisa Harker with a very important take on what needed to be done. In 2008, we had an interesting and instructive report from the Commons Select Committee, with a plethora of recommendations and warning signs about what had to be done. We have had public service agreement targets and the 2002, 2004 and 2007 CSR periods. We had Opportunity for All. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, was absolutely right: it is a document that I read avidly and it has not really recovered since she gave up the editorship. We have had targets all over the place. Is the Secretary of State expected to resign in 2010 or 2020, whoever he or she may be, if these targets are not met? What is different about putting them on the statute book? That is an important question. I now turn to the commission because the Child Poverty Commission is not that new either. We have been blessed with lots of experts. The Social Policy Research Unit at York, with Jonathan Bradshaw and his colleagues, and many other institutions—not just the LSE—have done marvellous, world-leading work on analysis of the problem and on offering prescriptions. What will the Child Poverty Commission add to what has been done there and in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, or work done by Donald Hirsch? It is world-class and I do not see how the Child Poverty Commission will find it easy to better that. It is all available free anyway, so what will the Child Poverty Commission bring that has not been available to us in the past? One thing that I would like the commission to undertake is firm qualitative research—and no doubt we will discuss that in Committee. I am particularly worried now about some of the persistent levels of poverty in working families in the United Kingdom. I have been subscribing to and agree with the Government’s active labour market policies, and I concede that the Government have done a lot. I acknowledge that, but we are now finding that there is persistent poverty in working families. That might be because there is a lot of part-time work in the system now. We need to understand that because if people think that it is safe to get people into jobs and assume that the problem is solved, they are wrong if some of these statistics are right. Maybe there is some work to be done there. I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Freud. I do not know anything about iron triangles. I did O-grade geometry and there are isosceles, scalene and obtuse triangles. I do not mean obtuse to be a derogatory term because it is a type of triangle with an angle of greater than 90 degrees within it, but I will go away and learn about iron triangles as well as three-legged stools for mothers and fathers and the state. I will go away and think about all those things. Although the noble Lord, Lord Freud, was trying to establish clear blue water between himself and everybody else, I do not think that he is that far away from us in saying that we have to produce the resources in a holistic way. I agree with him on that. He is worried about family breakdown and I know where he gets that worry from. My good friend Mr Andrew Selous is a very good thing and I am in favour of him. The only thing about which I disagree with him—he was a member of the Select Committee on which I served—is that he has this thing that families need fathers; he thinks that everybody needs to be married before the world will be right. I do not think that that is true. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, made the important point that in Scandinavian countries lone-parent families are very successful, so I do not buy the idea that the vows make the difference. I think that you can support and work with family units that are less than two married people. If the noble Lord, Lord Freud, is to address family breakdown, addiction, worklessness and the lack of educational skills, I am with him, but that needs not only a holistic approach but investment. I notice that neither he nor the Minister mentioned Clause 15, which is the get-out for any Government in the long term, as it makes all this subject to financial capability and that kind of thing. The Committee will want to drill into what that means for both major parties. If it represents a complete block on extra resources, we really are toiling. All parties at the coming election will need to find some way of devoting extra resources to this problem, whether through the benefits system or through the more holistic approach that I think the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has brought to the table. He is an innovator. He is the man who won the argument about getting the Treasury DEL and AME rules changed. However, if it is true that you can do that in a welfare/work context, why do we not say to people who live in families that are multiply deprived and in persistent poverty, "If you can prove that for an expenditure of £X,000 you can trade your way out as a family unit, never mind the benefit that you are on"—Professor Gregg has persuaded me that it does not matter what benefit you are on—"and if you can find your way to the table, to the local authority or the Jobcentre Plus personal adviser, and say ‘Look, just get me the resources, the grant or the loan that I need to become a nurse or a teacher and I can get my family into a much better place in three or five years’, we will say to you, ‘Come on down!’"? We should give those people the money. That is the kind of innovation that I hope we will be able to look to in the longer term. How should we present all this? The British population hates poor people, mainly due to the Daily Mail. That is an exaggeration, but only a slight one. There is a poisonous atmosphere to the debate, which is all about "scroungers" and the rest of it. We should start changing the rules. My noble friend Lady Walmsley made an important point about the cost-benefit analyses in the IFS and Joseph Rowntree Foundation studies. We should demonstrate that by spending money early—by early investment, pre-empting some of the worst effects of the long-term disadvantage that poverty causes—we can save the taxpayer money. We will explore the figures in Committee. I defer to colleagues who know more about the human values and moral virtues of protecting the life chances of individuals who are young and need protection, as they do, but I believe that we should get a bit more realistic about presenting this debate. We should take a much more cost-benefit analysis approach and say, "We can save a lot of money doing it this way". If we did that, we would be much better able to engage public support. I enjoyed the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate. I understand the rurality issue. I come from south-east Scotland, where my constituency was, so it was music to my ears when he identified the fact that, although the needs are different, they are just as great. I hope that the Committee will have the chance to look at some of that. There are all sorts of issues in which we can get involved in Committee. More than anything else, as a political institution that is interested in doing something in this area, we have to understand that, although money is of course going to be difficult to find, we must find ways, if we are to make any progress, of investing sensibly over the next 10 years in domestic households that are at the bottom of the social ladder. I am absolutely up for looking at new ways of doing this. There are problems with some of the Centre for Social Justice suggestions, which seem to ignore the fact that benefits are for households while taxation is about individuals. I do not yet see how those marry properly, but that is perhaps because I do not understand the iron triangle. I was told by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, in the period between the debate stopping and starting again, the very bad news that the book is 800 pages long. It might take me until next Christmas to read that. We must all expose ourselves to any new ideas that we can find, but we must also rededicate ourselves collectively—across the House, through all parties and the Cross Benches—to finding extra resources if we are going to tackle this problem adequately.