Child Poverty Bill

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, who made one of the points that I was going to make. On Amendment 26, the Minister could not have been clearer that the intention of the Bill is to improve the lives of all children, and I thank him for that. However, I am still slightly concerned about children who are not dependent, who are working, but who are earning very little money and whose circumstances may mean that they suffer many of the elements of deprivation that we are concerned about. I think I can assume that the Government intend to help those young people by other legislation outwith this Bill. On these Benches we were slightly surprised to hear the noble Lord say that it was not desirable that no child should suffer socio-economic disadvantage simply because he is afraid that those rights would be justiciable. Coming as I do from a children’s rights point of view on all these matters, I think it would be a very good thing if a child had a justiciable right to that sort of thing, which the UN convention offers the child. However, on that point, we could have more confidence in the common sense of the courts to not come up with decisions that are unreasonable in the current economic circumstances. I am most grateful to the Minister; he has reassured me and he has put on the record that all these strategies at every level—local, regional, devolved and national—must address the poverty of all children. I thank him for that.