Child Poverty Bill

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, for that intervention. I entirely accept that we cannot do this by saying, "Well, for everyone here we will add on 20 quid or 50 quid", or whatever number. That would be a desperate process of averaging, and I accept the noble Baroness’s point that it would be deeply unsatisfactory and equally unfair from the other direction. However, amazingly, the Office for National Statistics is beginning to get to grips with the issue. In 1979, it put up its hand and said, "We cannot possibly get anywhere here", but it is now beginning to get more of a grip. It has improved over the past 30 years, but not as much as it might have. Inserting a requirement in the Bill that you have to worry about this area will encourage the state to understand the impact of informal incomes on the process. If you do not understand that, clearly you cannot do much about it; if you do understand it, you can fine tune the strategies. It is to be hoped that over the next 10 years we may learn more about how to do this—it would be a shame if we did not—because the figure involved is not marginal. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, are smack on. I have not agreed so much with her for several amendments and I hope that we will agree on many more. In its report, Dynamic Benefits: Towards Welfare that Works, issued last year—which we shall debate later—the Centre for Social Justice dealt with the concept of disregards. It is interesting that the centre recommended it as one of the most efficient ways of doing several things, one of which is getting rid of the desperate disincentives to work or to getting back into the formal economy. Under the current system, we are almost begging people on the marginal rates of 90 per cent—more in some cases—to cheat the system. A methodology which discourages that kind of behaviour and brings flexibility back into the formal economy would make enormous sense. The amendment would encourage the Government to introduce a process which is structured in that way. I cannot resist making the point that when the Minister referred to trying to prevent tax avoidance and all the complexities that go with it, he was playing a game with us. He is a formidable accountant and he knows that we are not talking here about the avoidance of tax but about the evasion of tax.