Child Poverty Bill

I thank the Minister for that response. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for their contributions. I will hone in on the concern. When you have targets, there is always an instinct to nudge the figures just above the targets and go for easy results. There are signs, which we discussed elsewhere, that there has been a bit of that. There has been a sharp rise in the figure for underperforming children in the under-40 per cent of the median category—a much sharper rise than that for children in the under-60 per cent category. The risk is that we do not properly isolate those children who are the most vulnerable in the country. The data are hazy. Peter Saunders of Policy Exchange, in his Poverty of Ambition piece, draws out how poor some of the data are. He states: ""Astonishingly, for those in the bottom 5% of the income distribution, deprivation scores get worse as income rises. Children with equivalised incomes below 40% of the median income are less deprived than those with incomes between 40% and 60%. Children in the bottom 2% of incomes are less deprived than those whose incomes are well above the poverty line"." All kinds of odd things are happening in the data. If the Government take a relatively undifferentiated approach, they are likely to miss out the children who really need support. I am very appreciative of the general support of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, but he was concerned that the amendment would produce a rather small figure. It would, but it would be an immensely valuable group of people to isolate because they are probably the most needy people in the country. On the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, we would consider the children in, or likely to be in, the circumstances of the group and start honing early interventions for that group. That is the purpose here. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, also talked rather flatteringly about the DEL/AME switch. One of the most interesting parts of the huge amount of research in the area comes from the Child Poverty Action Group in its recent report. It states, bluntly, that the approach now being adopted towards welfare is the approach that we should adopt towards poverty. In other words, we should go to the people who have the problem and provide individualised support on a holistic basis. I used this quotation at Second Reading, but it bears repeating. In the same way that it is increasingly recognised that, ""a personalised, multifaceted service is required to assist jobseekers successfully into employment"," so a similar approach needs to be applied to poverty. I cite the Child Poverty Action Group. Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, about DEL/AME, the cost of the worst-off children is enormous for society. We know that it will cost, quite literally in many cases, millions of pounds per child. If we can isolate them and start to consider the costs we will incur and make the DEL/AME switches, as we do for welfare, we will start to prevent those costs. That has nothing to do with being a do-gooder, it is a cold assessment of the interests of the country to invest in preventing huge future costs. One does not have to be a bleeding heart to see the logic of that. If we are to do it, we must isolate the children and get very sophisticated about assessing where the investment should go. The purpose of the amendment is to start the process, so that we can begin tiering it up and thinking about the different amounts of money that we can put to different levels of need, and consider value for money.