Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the amendment gives us the opportunity to investigate thoroughly the issues surrounding the target in real time, so to speak. It is a genuine mystery why we are likely to fail to reach the 2010-11 target. There was a mysterious turnaround in performance in approaching the child poverty targets in 2004, despite a remarkable boom. The figures show that when this Government came into office in 1997—I am using 1997-98 as the base year—there were, depending on whether you are considering the before housing costs or the after housing costs, either 3.4 million or 4.2 million children in households below the poverty line, which is defined as below 60 per cent of the median income. In the turnaround year of 2004-05, which was the best year of performance, the figures had fallen to 2.7 million or 3.6 million, depending on whether you are considering the before or after housing costs. I know that there are estimates for what may or may not have happened subsequently, which clearly we can discuss, but the actual figures for 2007-08 show that the number had risen again to 2.9 million on the before housing costs and 4 million on the after housing costs. In the discrepancy between the before and after, you can see the strain caused by the housing boom in that period, because the increase in child poverty since the low point—the good point—of 2004 is roughly double on the after housing cost basis what it is on the before housing cost basis. None of the explanations that I have heard so far—we rehearsed some of them at Second Reading—are satisfactory, especially as we are not talking about a relative phenomenon or a move relative to the median. This is not a statistical quirk. If we hold the definition of poverty steady—in other words, if we use the absolute definition of poverty, not the relative one—we see that the number of children in poor households grew by 200,000 after housing costs since that good year of 2004. At best, it only held flat on the before housing cost figure. Indeed, when you look at the before housing cost figure, you see that the numbers below 50 per cent of the median went up by 100,000, which means that the very poorest have done considerably worse since the turning point. It is not surprising that the Rowntree trust warned in its report Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2009: ""At this rate of progress, it would take until the 2050s to halve child poverty"." That is a worrying statement, given that we had a fantastic boom in the last decade. It is vital for the sake of this Bill that we understand these trends properly. As the Spanish poet George Santayana famously said: ""Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it"." In another place, Stephen Timms admitted that the Government had got only two-thirds of the way towards their target. This was said in Committee, before other policy initiatives were announced. I should add, to reinforce the importance of this, that he went on to say: ""The arrangement that the Bill sets out is significantly more demanding for the coming decade than arrangements that have been in place over the past 10 years".—[Official Report, Commons, Child Poverty Bill Committee, 20/10/09; col. 8.]" The target was ambitious, but the Government badly failed to meet it in a good economic climate. Some major questions need answering when you start to look at the statistics. There was a reduction in relative poverty among children in workless households but not in working households. How much of the poverty has been caused by income transfers as opposed to tackling the causes of poverty? For instance, we do not have a full assessment of the effect of the removal of the 10p tax rate and the measures to compensate the people who were affected by it. It would be immensely valuable to have a proper report of this period. This would also give us a dry run in assessing the significance of statutory targets in this context. In particular, it would give us a genuine check on what such a measure as Clause 15 in this Bill really stands for. Clause 15 says that the Secretary of State must take into account the, ""fiscal circumstances and in particular the likely impact of any measure on taxation, public spending and public borrowing"." The clause is immensely significant, given the history of statutory targets. Let me take the example of the fuel poverty target in the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000. When that was taken to court in a process of judicial review, the Government were able to plead successfully that resources were not available. Clause 15 seems to have the same effect, allowing the Government of the day to argue that the money was not available. Indeed, Stephen Timms explicitly told the Committee that, ""in the current environment, Government spending is very tightly constrained. That, in particular, is what has limited what has been possible over the last couple of years".—[Official Report, Commons, Child Poverty Bill Committee, 20/10/09; col. 9.]" It is not very encouraging, then, that he forecast that there would be a further decade of what he delicately called "consolidation", which was a reference to the progress of the economy. He also confirmed that there would not be a carve-out of the obligations under this Bill from those of the Fiscal Responsibility Bill. Let us find out soon whether we have a Bill that means something or is purely declamatory. The risk being run is that this Bill is interpreted as being either a diversionary tactic or a poisoned pill. It could be argued that it is diversionary in that this Government have failed to succeed in the benign conditions that have prevailed in the past decade and have therefore stopped looking at that and have lifted their eyes and our eyes to the distant horizon. The Bill can be accused of being a poisoned pill because it provides an opportunity for whoever is the Opposition to lambast whatever Government are in power for not making further progress in very difficult conditions while avoiding taking responsibility for the current Government’s time in power. I am not accusing the Government of these unworthy sentiments; I am warning that opposition to this amendment will make them seem that they are being manipulative in this way. Therefore, the proposal is that we use a formal report as a tool to understand what the real challenge is, we avoid the accusation that this Government are unworthily using diversionary tactics and we understand what a statutory target really means in the real world. If this Bill fails to stand up in the real world, which I fear it might as it is currently drafted, at least the next Government will know that they will need to tackle the problem in another way. I beg to move.