Child Poverty Bill

I have three points to make in support of my noble friend’s important amendment. First, the last report by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee in the 2007-08 Session—its second report—was called The Best Start in Life? Alleviating Deprivation, Improving Social Mobility and Eradicating Child Poverty. Its conclusion in Recommendation 2 was that abandoning the use of the after housing cost measure, ""may mask the true extent of child poverty"." It went on to argue, after taking evidence from a wide range of sources, that the DWP should use the after housing costs measure as a basis for the PSA target. We have moved on since then—that was the 2007-08 report. My second point is that anybody who looks at this—perhaps I am not the best person to make this argument—will see that London is the epicentre of poverty in the United Kingdom, for a variety of reasons. People might be surprised about that. If you look at the extent to which poverty arises in London, it is clear that the Government will not reach any of their targets unless something dramatic is done to improve the circumstances that apply in London. There is a combination of the worst contra-indicating factors of ethnicity, disability, shortage of part-time work and large families. Noble Lords all know what predisposes low-income household families to suffer. The conditions are all in existence in London—in spades. If that is true of the generality of these factors, housing is the biggest issue of all. When you see the housing benefit system struggle to cope in London, you realise how important the issue is. It is not just regional. The Government will not succeed in what they are trying to do by 2020 unless they address the situation in London. Finally, I will make a point as a watcher of these things. The statistics on below average income households are very dense. The people who generate the reports issue press releases that make them intelligible to ordinary people. My fear is that, if after housing costs are not treated with the same significance by the Government, the people who write the reports will not emphasise them. The May 2009 figures for households below average income were very clear, when they were explained by the people who produced them, about the significance of the after housing costs measure. If the Government abandon after housing costs in the way that has been suggested in the Bill, my fear is that that the measure will slip off their agenda and it will be much harder for ordinary people trying to make sense of what is going on and to find the trends to mine the raw data for themselves if they do not get explanations from the officials who produce the reports.