Child Poverty Bill

As so often happens, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has put her finger on the main aspect of this problem. However, I cannot begin to agree with the conclusions that she draws. I believe that the Bill is wholly unbalanced. It is meant to address child poverty but addresses household income. That is a perfectly respectable thing to do and if it was called the Household Income Bill I would be perfectly happy with it, but it is not. I started to write a speech about this but I have in a sense been shot down. I was going to say, and I believe it is true, that one of the commonest fallacies in the world is to believe that because two things coincide statistically one must be the cause of the other. Perhaps I may waste the time of the Committee for about 30 seconds. I thought of this the other day when I was going through some greetings cards and I found one which said, "Birthdays are good for your health. The more you have of them, the longer you live". That rather struck home. Undoubtedly, household poverty is extremely important in terms of outcomes for children. How are we going to balance this Bill so that the financial aspects of it do not receive disproportional importance and the non-financial aspects get swept neatly under the table? That is the issue that we are all concerned about. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for bringing forward these issues, because in this absolutely hopeless amendment, he actually makes a tremendously important point.