Child Poverty Bill

I add to what my noble friend has said and, in doing so, express my gratitude to the Minister for his reply on Traveller children. I would be grateful for a letter, if that is possible; I was most grateful for the information that he provided and the general response that he has made. I was moved by what he said in this debate to think how very perverse and unhelpful targets can be and how important it is not to over-rely on targets and to have rich targets, especially when dealing with children. I am reminded of this particularly because of a conference yesterday run by Barnardo’s, called "Counting the Cost of Care", which looks at children in care. Martin Narey described how in the past the Government set targets to keep children out of care, so local authorities have a target to reduce the numbers of children taken into care. When he was commissioned by the Government to look at the issue, he and his colleagues were convinced that that must be the right direction. However, by going out into the field and talking to families, he discovered that children were being placed with families where the mothers were addicted to heroin and were having a terrible experience—but the whole drive was to return children to families, so that must be the right thing. We have to be careful to choose the right targets and not to over-rely on them. With the education targets for looked-after children, it is right that they have performed very poorly compared with other children, but we have failed to take into account the fact that so many of them had such a difficult experience before being taken into care. The result of over-relying on achieving that target of four or five good GCSEs is that we have rubbished the foster carers and the whole system around caring for these children by saying, "We’ve put so much money in but they are not achieving the results we want". I hope that in the course of this Bill we do not have reductive, simplistic financial targets but give strength wherever possible to richer targets, similar to those in the UNICEF report which was so well received and helpful. What is measured gets acted on—that is what I am always hearing. In a time of recession, the danger is that whatever is measurable will receive attention and action and the important other aspects of children’s lives are ignored. A good factor in the UNICEF report was that it looked at time spent by children with their parents. In Italy, which performed best, children have regular meal times with their parents, which came through in the targets. So rich targets of that kind are helpful, but even they have to be treated with circumspection. I am sorry for taking up the Committee’s time at this point, but I hope that I shall not have to intervene later on, when we come back to this matter.