Child Poverty Bill

I thank the Minister for making that point. I shall come back to it, though. There are enough discrepancies in the data, as we can see from the IFS report among others, to suggest that when you want a hard, irreducible measure of the income and deprivation of people in real hardship, if they are measured over a reasonable period such as three years, you know that you are capturing them. The data on shorter periods seem much more volatile, including on deprivation. If you want to start to tier the children at risk, therefore, this group—three years plus three years, in each—would seem to be an enormously valuable place to start. My reading of the data suggests that the one-year material deprivation does not capture those children reliably. I accept that this is clearly an issue of data interpretation, as the Minister has said. I will commit to go and brood on the data and we may even discuss them in the interim before deciding whether this is to be assumed.