Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for bringing this amendment forward. Persistent material deprivation has always exercised me more than anything else. As I said earlier, I share his view that looking at statistical metrical data is not sufficient to deal with the problem. However, I wonder how easy it would be to collect the data in the way that he suggested. I genuinely do not know whether it would be easy to do so. It is obviously easier for statisticians. We all accept these surveys a little too casually. For the reasons that he has given, it is not safe to rely on them exclusively, because they are subject to statistical problems and contain lacunae. I agree with him that in the area of self-employment, the figures are notoriously difficult to rely on. He has highlighted something that we need to look at. People who have lived in poverty for three out of four years are a key group who should be targeted and given special assistance. If he can devise other methods that are fair across the board and easily administered, I would be very willing to look at them and would encourage the department to study the suggestions. The one note that worried me in the excellent introduction to the amendment given by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, was the fact that he seemed to suggest that people are not as poor as they are made out to be. That is not my experience. If I was left entirely to my own devices, I would use minimum income standards when dealing with material and persistent deprivation, as other European nations do. Material deprivation gets worse as it goes on, and if people are stuck in the trough of material deprivation for three out of four years, they should be entitled to take advantage of the unique gift to the nation suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Freud; namely, the changing of the DEL/AME rules. If I was the head of a family and I could demonstrate that I had been in material deprivation persistently for three out of four years, I should be able to go to Jobcentre Plus and say, "I want to do something to get me out of this". It might take £5,000, £10,000 or £15,000 to get me qualified as a healthcare assistant or a plumber. It would make absolute sense if you could demonstrate that the conditions applied; namely, material deprivation for three out of four years. People should get a hand—I mean a serious hand—in the form of the bursary or grant that they need, with the childcare to match. If people act in good faith, they deserve special treatment of that kind. That is a bit of a fantasy, because it is a very difficult thing to organise. However, it would motivate people and would not have any of the perverse disincentives to work involved in simply giving people extra money. We as a society have to do something to deal with family households in material and persistent deprivation. My experience is that it is not just that they trade themselves out, as the Policy Exchange work that I have studied suggests. The worst thing that happens to them is that they fall into and out of work. For children, that is even worse, because they do not know where they are at any given moment. Being locked into a cycle for three or four years in which you are in low-paid work, then receive benefits and then go back into low-paid work destroys any ability to give a real advantage to young children. It is very difficult for families to deal with the key formative moments of their children’s lives. The amendment goes a long way towards meeting my concerns in principle. I do not know about its operational effectiveness or feasibility, and if I rightly detected that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, thinks that there are not as many people at this level of poverty as I think there are, I distance myself from him to that extent. Otherwise, it is a perfectly good idea in principle, and I look forward to hearing what the department has to say about it, because it is worth thinking about.