Child Poverty Bill

Perhaps the Minister can help me to understand this better. I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for his amendment. On the one hand I see that, if we want to make a difference, it is important to target the neediest, because they will often be missed, and it is they who need the most dedicated help to improve their lives. On the other hand, I think about the experience on the continent with children in care: more children are taken into care, but there is also more outreach to families, more support and more early intervention. My thought in responding to the amendment is that it may be a good approach to detect families before they fall into persistent poverty, but that supporting families when they are in this state of persistent poverty is also very important. I am torn. I suppose that one wants to try to do both: to intervene early to prevent them from entering into persistent poverty, and then to make damned sure that families in persistent poverty get the intervention that they need to get out of it before all the terrible consequences have an impact on their children.