Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, is asking what will keep us heading for the target. However, I have not quite caught what he was trying to say. Nevertheless it reminds me that whatever we have in legislation, we need to be motivated to achieve improvements for these families. A great deal of legislation passes through this House. We had the Children Act 1989, which was a wonderful piece of legislation that enshrined in law all sorts of protections for families. Later the noble Lord, Lord Laming, said during the course of the Children Act 2004 that if we had only implemented the 1989 Act, we would not need a new Bill. So this is an important Bill and these are important targets. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, implied what figures such as 10 per cent, 11 per cent and 9 per cent really mean. We want to eradicate child poverty as far as possible. That is what we are here for. Putting a figure on it could be unhelpful in some ways because it might suggest that once poverty is down to 10 per cent, we can stop trying. That is not right. We have to keep going because we do not want any child to grow up in poverty. That may be beyond our means, but we are going to try as hard as we can not to let that happen. I am sorry to take some time on this, but will the Minister and his colleagues think about institutionalising other means to tackle the problem? The noble Lord, Lord Martin, spoke eloquently about his personal experience of the poverty experienced by many families in Glasgow, and I have spoken to MPs who have had extremely powerful experiences when accompanying health visitors and seeing the poverty in which some families are living. If industry can set up the Industry and Parliament Trust, a mechanism by which Members of the House of Lords can easily visit a business and shadow an engineer over a period and get to know and build relationships with people in industry so that they understand and give the right priority to the concerns of industry, why should there not be a programme through which parliamentarians can accompany health visitors visiting families living in poverty and perhaps build a relationship with a health visitor or a family over a number of years and by that means be motivated to enact this legislation and make it happen? I recently read a biography of the first Earl Attlee, who had an upper middle class background, and went to live in the east London settlement of Toynbee Hall. He was so moved by that experience and his earlier experience of seeing how people in deprived areas lived that he achieved what he did when he led the Labour Party. I apologise for taking your Lordships’ time when we are running rather slowly, but I wanted to flag this up as something that the Minister might like to consider with his colleagues. I should be interested to hear his thoughts on it.