Child Poverty Bill

Let me say at the outset that I welcome the provision of income-related target-setting provided for in the Bill. However, I regret that the income targets will be related to children only in a narrowly defined definition of "qualifying households". Amendment 9 seeks therefore to widen the definition of the "qualifying household". The definition as provided for is set out in the draft statutory instrument child poverty target 2010. The draft regulation requires a qualifying household to have a postcode and to receive no more than 50 items of mail per day. That is, in my view, a perverse provision, because it does not in any way reflect the reality of life in modern Britain. The qualifying criteria start with a set of stereotypical assumptions that we are all part of a nuclear family with 2.5 children living in white, middle-class suburbia. Nothing could be further from the truth. To make my point, I can do no better than to quote the summary of the scrutiny report on the Bill by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member: ""The Government have provided sufficient information to show that children who live in communal accommodation or who live in accommodation without a postcode, such as Gypsy and Romany children, are unlikely to be encompassed by the definition of children in qualifying households"." What the Joint Committee is really saying is that if you link the principle of qualifying households to a postcode, Gypsy and Romany children, for example, and many other groups, will be left out. The definition of qualifying household means that children in communal accommodation such as children’s homes, children in bed and breakfast accommodation, Traveller children and children of asylum seekers in detention centres will not be included. To date, when challenged on the point of the limitation on the qualifying household, the Government’s response is that a wider definition is not practicable and would cost too much. On that point of cost and practicability, the Joint Committee says: ""We are not persuaded by the justification provided by the Government which rests on the costs and impracticability of surveying children who do not live in qualifying households. We recommend the inclusion in the Bill of a target or targets that would apply to children not living in the defined qualifying households"." Indeed, the Joint Committee states in its report that the use of targets which exclude large groups of children from the criteria of qualifying households is potentially indirectly discriminatory and, as such, it questions whether the Bill is compatible with Article 14 of the human rights convention. The Government, in response, indicated that it is not discriminatory because the qualification would be set out in qualifying statutory instruments. I have already quoted from the draft instrument, and it does not in fact take the Government’s argument any further. The draft instrument says that it is a postcode with less than 50 items of post on any one day. So I believe that that is the end of the Government’s argument that they will be looking at secondary legislation to define the statutory qualifying household. In conclusion, the amendment seeks to widen the definition to include children in communal accommodation or communal households, as we believe that they have as much right to be included as any other children. They have not taken any action to put themselves in that situation and therefore they should not be excluded. It is on that basis that I seek to widen the definition of qualifying household. I beg to move.