Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I did not table this amendment just to amuse you. It replaces the target figure of 10 per cent with a no less arbitrary, but rather less comfortably round, figure of 9.85 per cent. This is, of course, a probing amendment, and I hope to give the Minister and the Committee more generally the chance to discuss the value of setting a target at the particular threshold stated in the Bill, of 10 per cent of children. Everyone would find decreasing the percentage of children brought up in relative poverty to a much lower figure, such as 10 per cent, a praiseworthy aim. If a future Government meet the target, they will have made enormous strides in improving the welfare and opportunities of children in the UK. However, 10 per cent does not represent the eradication of child poverty, as some colleagues of the Minister still insist on claiming. They may express it as: "That’s the nearest we can get, given the lack of reliable data". The whole objective of this Bill is to ensure that child poverty remains at the top of political priorities for the next decade. I actually see this as a reduction from the original intention, which is to make the UK among the best countries in Europe for a child to live and be brought up in. I am asking: is this percentage the right figure to be aiming at in the context of the data we have? An arbitrary target such as 10 per cent could become unhelpful. You would not, for instance, reject a measure just because it reduced the level of child poverty to 11 per cent. You would not stop focusing on the area just because you had already reduced it to 9 per cent. I shall address the issue of the reliability of the data. Some organisations with perfectly honourable and good intentions have lobbied to replace the figure with a target of 5 per cent. That target has been reached, albeit for rather short periods, by a few countries, which have tended to be small and enjoying an economic boom when they achieved it. I agree with the Government that 5 per cent is not a realistic figure, given the limitations on the data and the way that poverty is a transient phenomenon, as I have already discussed. I have much more sympathy with the Government’s aim that the target, once reached, should be maintained for three years so that any improvement in children’s lives is genuinely long term and represents a permanent change, not a one-off surge for the target year with a collapse afterwards. It is clear that we shall spend a lot of time discussing the strategies for how to tackle child poverty, but before we have that discussion I want to be comfortable that the figure of 10 per cent, which is so prominent in the Bill—it is placed early and in a prominent position—does not hinder steps that the Secretary of State should be taking and is a helpful and appropriate measure of success. With this amendment, I want to give the Minister the opportunity to provide a full explanation of why the 10 per cent threshold has been chosen.