Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, again, I am grateful for the creative and innovative approach that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, demonstrates on this. I am puzzled, however, by how he makes his case. For anyone who has watched the benefits system over the past 15 to 20 years, benefits in kind have been a mitigating factor, because the levels of income support have been so low. That is a clear objective. It started with the report of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, in 1986, which produced the 1988 welfare Act. What flowed from that was a means of diminishing costs; it also simplified the benefit administration, because you did not have to duplicate applications, so it had force in that direction. But one thing that I am absolutely certain about is that passported benefits are an absolutely core part of the system right now; I refer to housing benefit and things like that, which have now been extended to tax benefits. It would frighten a lot of people to hear him talk of interfering with passported benefits, as he seems to suggest, unless he was very clear about what he was doing. I understand the argument that he was making, intellectually. If everybody had a modest but adequate income and could be sure that they could live and meet their nutritional standards from day to day and week to week, I would be very interested in listening to him develop his argument. He may be right—but what he threatens to do, if he is not careful, is to impose passporting of benefits and vouchers and all the rest into situations in which people actually cannot cope at the moment. That would be a serious worry for me, and I suspect for others as well. My second question is the same one that I had in the informal economy debate. How is this to be done? With the best will in the world, if I am in a household where I have a Sure Start maternity grant, free school meals, a Healthy Start scheme and a child trust fund, how am I to fill in the family resources survey form when it comes round to try to identify what is available to me, or not, so that we can make these lofty decisions about whether it would be better to do all this in kind? How is it to be done? What mechanism is to be used? What questions do you ask? If you start putting together a form with every passported benefit on it, it will be a very difficult form to fill in. There are people who do not understand that they are getting benefits of a passported kind, so complex is the system. Again, I am willing to be challenged by the kind of things that the noble Lord is saying, because it is right that we should think about these things afresh. There is value in that. Passported benefits are such a sensitive issue for millions of households in this country, and I would be very nervous about interfering with them in the way that is suggested in the amendment.