UK Parliament / Open data

Child Poverty Bill

Proceeding contribution from Lord Freud (Conservative) in the House of Lords on Tuesday, 19 January 2010. It occurred during Debate on bills and Committee proceeding on Child Poverty Bill.
My Lords, this is probably the central, most important amendment that we wish to make to the Bill. There is a real difference in philosophy between the Government and us over the Bill, and that is how best to tackle the problem of child poverty. The Government have traditionally been interested in tackling it through financial means. The agent in control of the child poverty agenda has been the Treasury. Sir Nicholas Macpherson, its permanent secretary, told the Treasury Select Committee in 2007: ""The primary reason that the Treasury has led on Child Poverty is that we control the levers which are critical for meeting the 2010 target, as we set the levels of financial support for families. Employment will have an important impact on achieving our goal of halving child poverty, but financial support is the most important lever"." I acknowledge that that approach seems to have been modified recently, and I note that the impact assessment to the Bill mentions balancing the approach. It states: ""Rather than just trying to address child poverty through increasing transfers ... the most effective strategies would be to combine action on income with other social policies designed to reduce the disadvantages of growing up in poor families and deprived neighbourhoods"." It concludes: ""The legislation is specifically designed to ensure that the Government uses a wide range of interventions via public services, with financial support only one of these interventions"." I apologise if I have taken some of the references that the Minister would have used to respond to the amendment. I am conscious that the Minister responsible for the Bill is the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, who has just piloted the Welfare Reform Bill through the House, with its emphasis on individualised intervention to help the economically inactive. I therefore certainly know that he will understand and appreciate the important specific interventions to support the most disadvantaged. Indeed, many of those around this Table today discussed exactly these issues in our consideration of the Welfare Reform Bill, and I welcome the fact that we can have an informed debate around the Chamber because of that experience. The sophisticated report by the Child Poverty Action Group, Coping with Complexity, is entirely in line with this approach. It emphasises the complexity of poverty and calls for policies to tackle a wide set of features of poverty. Let me lay my cards on the table. As noble Lords will know, my party’s policy is centred on tackling the causes of poverty rather than the symptoms. Our concern is that there is an imbalance in the Bill between the two approaches. The Bill lays out a range of financial targets and contains no direct targets to deal with the causes of poverty. It smells of the traditional Treasury approach and not the modern DWP one. The amendment aims to ensure that the Government worry just as much about the fundamental causes of poverty as they do about the score card. We are far from alone in this concern. Let me again quote the Child Poverty Action Group, which says: ""It would be churlish not to acknowledge the progress made in the official measurement of poverty and wrong to deny a political commitment to tackle the problem"." We entirely concur with that, and we would never wish to be accused of being churlish, as we discussed a few months ago. The Child Poverty Action Group continues: ""Nevertheless, the measures currently employed fall far short of capturing the multi-dimensional experience of poverty described above"." I chose the four targets in the amendment because all the current evidence indicates that they are the main drivers of poverty. I have not specified the exact targets because these can be developed by the commission. Indeed, it would be an invaluable service on the part of the commission. Moreover, flexibility may well be desirable in setting the precise levels that will have an impact on solving the problems, and the system should be able to absorb this. Let me deal with the specific targets individually. The most important target relates to stable relationships. The Child Poverty Action Group found that, ""the effect of separation on a couple (whether married or co-habiting) in terms of increasing risk of poverty was much greater than for any of the other triggers that we were able to investigate, including job loss"." Yet the underlying trends show big increases. I am indebted to the Centre for Social Justice for its document Breakdown Britain, which opens up this area. It is a little old—it dates from 2006—but it cites the big trends: a decline in the number of couples, down from 70 per cent of households in 1971 to 53 per cent in 2003, and an increase in lone-parent households from 7 per cent to 10 per cent. Couple instability has increased dramatically from 500,000 separations in 1971 to 3.5 million in 2001. At the same time as these trends have become clear, the number of cohabiting couples has increased, up from negligible levels in the 1970s to 2 million in 2003. In other words, by that year, cohabiting couples represented 10 per cent of all households and 16 per cent of all couples. I do not think we need to take a moral stance about cohabitation compared with marriage, but the sad truth seems to be that relationships involving cohabiting parents are far more likely to break down that those of married parents. According to research undertaken for the Centre for Social Justice, it is estimated that 30,000 children aged under five experience the break-up of their married parents, while 90,000 experience the break-up of their unmarried parents. The CSJ concludes by stating: ""In other words, as the number of divorces affecting young children declines, family breakdown trends are being driven entirely by the increase in unstable cohabiting partnerships"." Here we have what on the surface looks like a major cause of poverty, and in particular of poverty in young children, but this Government do not even collect the relevant figures. The Minister, Helen Goodman, said: ""Defining the causes of poverty, as the amendments would require, is therefore not possible to achieve at present owing to gaps in the evidence base and limitations in the data available".—[Official Report, Commons, Child Poverty Bill Committee, 9/12/09; col. 423.]." The irony of this is that the "gaps in the evidence base" and the "limitations in the data available" arise chiefly because the Government created them. They did so first with the Office for National Statistics Neighbourhood Renewal Unit failure to publish a family breakdown index and statistics along with the other seven indices of neighbourhood deprivation after the Social Exclusion Unit had specifically named family breakdown as one of the causes. They did so secondly when Jacqui Smith announced that marital status would be removed from government forms. To judge from an article in the Sunday Times on 27 December, the Government have become late converts to the importance of stable relationships and marriage. Indeed, a Green Paper is projected for this week outlining measures designed to shore up parental relationships. Ed Balls was quoted as saying: ""I think our policy now is actually about the strength of the adult relationships and that is important for the progress of the children"." We should welcome this recent conversion, especially as the government spokesman, Helen Goodman, said in Committee that the Government were not wholly convinced that family breakdown was a cause of poverty. Regrettably, the conversion has happened 10 years too late. So the purpose of paragraph (a) in this amendment is to ensure that we monitor and have strategies in place to prevent family break-up, whether the parents are married or cohabiting. The evidence would suggest that the greatest concern should lie with the latter group. I shall move on to address the issue of workless households. Here it is possible to speak more briefly, not least because I think that we and the Government are in agreement that work is a key route out of poverty. The issue here is less the direct effects of worklessness on income levels—indeed, this strategy on its own will do little for in-work poverty. It is disturbing that a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report has found that in each of the past two years, the number of children in low-income households where at least one adult is in paid work has grown by almost half a million from the low point reached in 2003-04. More important is the example set by parents regarding the importance of work for their children. If a child lives in a household in which neither parent works, they have no role models leading them to work. Indeed, family members can put strong pressure on their offspring not to engage in such a disruptive activity. This, we argue, is part of the reason why social mobility has been found by researchers to be decreasing rather than increasing. The Child Poverty Action Group analysis found that, ""changing the status of a household head from employment to unemployment has substantial negative effects on a child’s home life, risky behaviour and educational orientation—effects which, in the symmetrical world of cross-sectional modelling, could be reversed by policies that successfully help unemployed people enter work"." I should acknowledge that it makes various caveats about exactly who that should apply to, but the central point is made. Paragraph (c) of the amendment is slightly different. According to Breakdown Britain, there are about 1.5 million children growing up in substance-abusing households, more than 1 million with parents abusing alcohol and 350,000 in households where there is drug-taking. According to the Gambling Commission, about 250,000 adults were defined as "problem gamblers", although I could not find figures on how many children they were responsible for. There are two issues here. First, many parents with an addiction of this kind are likely to be unsatisfactory parents—in other words, their addiction is likely to reduce the well-being of their children. Secondly, such addicts deeply undermine the whole approach of the Bill, with its measures of income and material deprivation. A substantial proportion of the income is likely to be diverted from the welfare of the child to feeding the parents’ habit. It is absolutely no good to adopt strategies in these cases based on increasing income. This is where we see the benefits of a child well-being approach, which would capture the evidence of inadequate parenting. Paragraph (d) of the amendment covers another area where I suspect that there is little difference between ourselves and the Government. To put this in context, this is the area where the UK has the greatest relative disadvantage as an economy. The Leitch review found that 35 per cent of the working-age population do not have the equivalent of a good school-leaving qualification. That is more than double the proportion in countries like Canada, the US and Germany. About 4.6 million have no qualifications at all, according to Leitch, while 5 million working-age people lack functional literacy and 7 million lack functional numeracy. I do not think that the figures have changed materially since 2006. There is a strong correlation between low skills and unemployment, especially when combined with other disadvantages. Lowly educated parents are more likely to be unemployed and living on benefits. At the same time, poor educational performance by parents is a strong predictor for that of their children. Our high number of NEETs, now running at about 950,000 children and young adults, is therefore both a poor outcome for children and a foreboding situation for their children in turn. This final paragraph aims to ensure that we measure and control education and skills at home. I beg to move.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
716 c162-6GC 
Session
2009-10
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
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