Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, who is not in his place at the moment, said that he thought that the discussion was ethereal. I think that this debate has been slightly surreal in some ways. I thought that this would be a rather dry subject, because it involved just the figures to be captured, but it has turned out to be a much wider debate about housing. The noble Lord, Lord Martin, made a very good Grand Committee maiden speech. He told us all about housing in Glasgow and about the men who went to the pub to get away from the overcrowding and stopped drinking so much when they got a house of their own. That was a very interesting aspect of life in Glasgow. I wish that we had been able to talk more about housing in general, but we had better stick to the topic of the amendment or we will be here all night. Surely leaving housing to the material deprivation score is rather a convoluted way of arriving at a family’s disposable income. I would have thought that collecting the after housing costs was much simpler. Even if HBAI is still going to collect them, I am still not quite sure why the Government do not give in and say, "Okay, we will collect both, and then we will be happy and you will be happy". I was interested to hear the Minister say that the consultation showed that people wanted the before housing costs, because all the groups and the academic researchers seemed to prefer the after housing costs. That is why we tabled the amendment, because the method that it proposes seemed to be the one that everyone used, as it is much simpler. I wonder whether HBAI will continue to collect after housing costs after the Bill has been enacted. I hope that it does, because it tells us something. I must also talk about transport. I certainly do not disagree with the point about transport, particularly in London. Everyone knows that if you have a low-paid job, on the whole you live out of London and come in because the transport is relatively good, but in some rural areas it may be more expensive to live near a transport hub. This is why we need both figures. London is a particular example, but there are many other areas of the country that we should not ignore. I will not speak any further about this, although I am afraid that the Minister has not told me anything that I did not know already. I am tempted to table this amendment again on Report and call for a Division, but I will leave that to another day. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 2 withdrawn.