Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I shall be brief. We support this amendment to mandate the Secretary of State to make a report setting out an assessment of progress towards meeting the 2010 target. Such a report should focus minds on the scale of the task towards meeting the 2020 goal. As the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has said, for most of the past 10 years the economy has been healthy, but we are still a very long way from meeting the halfway target on child poverty and this will get even harder in the next five years or so when belts will have to be tightened. Although it is not strictly relevant to this amendment, I particularly welcome the government amendment that we shall reach next week and which was announced in the Pre-Budget Report. It proposes an extension of the entitlement to free school lunches and milk for primary school children whose parents are on working tax credits and an increase in child benefit this year over and above indexation.