Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the points raised by the noble Baroness. She is quite right to seek to make these financial targets as accurate a measure as possible for assessing the well-being of children living in the relevant households. I have already spoken about the danger of relying on purely financial measures of child poverty. We will talk in more depth about that. The issue here is the extent to which housing is a freely chosen good for people in the community and to what extent it is effectively imposed on them as forced spending. The housing boom over the past decade has undoubtedly led to a situation in some areas of the country where high housing costs are not, as the Government insist, a matter of choice for families. This might be true if ample affordable housing was available, but we all know that such accommodation is in critically short supply in many areas of the country. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, mentioned London. He is quite right that London has a terrible problem with supplying affordable housing. It is almost laughable to claim that before housing cost income is a comparable indicator of lifestyle across the country. I am not convinced that this amendment on its own will calm my concerns about the financial targets. The dangers of relying solely on financial targets will not be avoided completely, no matter how carefully we define the measurement of those targets. After housing costs might indeed be more indicative of disposable incomes, especially in some parts of the country, but the noble Baroness identifies in a later amendment another cost that many would argue is non-discretionary. I can think of many more areas that could be excepted. For example, why is money spent on food basics still to be considered discretionary? Transport costs, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, mentioned, are also unavoidable in many cases. A dramatic example is childcare, which is often a necessary cost of working. Then there are school uniforms, heating costs and so on. These amendments are right to try to match the targets that the Bill sets more closely to the deprivation that a child actually feels. I am sceptical about the possibility of defining household income with sufficient precision to make it a direct proxy for child well-being in all cases, but this amendment represents an improvement over what is currently in the Bill—I say that at the risk of being accused again of trying to water down the Bill for our own nefarious purposes. I will be interested to hear the Minister explain why the Government continue to reject such a measure and indeed seek in practice to prevent a future Government from using after housing costs, should that Government wish to do so.