Child Poverty Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her support for our position. When I was quoting issues around the rights that children may have, I was quoting the JCHR report, so its view was advanced in that quotation, which is one that I support. The noble Baroness is right. We are talking about one Bill on strategies around child poverty, and inevitably there will be lots of things going on around government. At the moment, lots of effort is focused on young people who are NEETs. I think it is right to say that the figures around 16 and 17 year-old NEETs have reduced for the past three years. A lot of work is focused on trying to get young people into training or work or remaining in education. That will continue. The juxtaposition of children who are dependent on our definitions and other will inevitably be something that the strategies to deal with child poverty will have to address, and they will be encompassed within that. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, picked up on the point about what is measurable and what is not measurable. In my response on that matter, I was trying to focus particularly on the income-related targets. If we have those targets, measuring whether we meet them has got to only encompass things that we can include within that measurement. That is not to say that there are not—as there are at the moment—a lot of PSA targets and subsidiary targets around a whole range of government business and aspirations, and that will continue. The noble Earl is absolutely right that sometimes targets—the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has pursued this line to some extent—can engender perverse behaviour. We need to ensure that is not happening in this case. The assurance is that strategy has to be refreshed every three years, and there has to be an annual report on that. That report is not going to just be along those narrow income targets; it will be around the generality of the strategy.