Child Poverty Bill

I want to respond to the noble Lord instantly, because I think he may not have understood the point that I was trying to make. My point is this: if you have a target which is based on financial transfers only, any bureaucracy that is driven towards performing to those targets will tend to look at financial transfers, and the importance of other, in-kind transfers, will be increasingly ignored. The risk is that in-kind transfers, which may be highly valued by people, will steadily, in a bureaucratic way, decline in relative importance because the bureaucracy is not driving to them; they do not exist. Targets, as we all know—we have had a lot of them in the past 10 years—can have perverse effects. They work; they force people to do things in certain ways. I am saying that these targets risk undermining in-kind provision because they are not counted.