Child Poverty Bill

Perhaps the noble Lord is overlooking the fact that the OECD reports have real problems—as he will know from the research of Jonathan Bradshaw—in equivalising between countries because in some, for example, people have to pay for their healthcare or education, whereas here they are, so to speak, goods in kind. That is the problem that the OECD faces. It is not that the British system is problematic, but parents in countries where they are expected to provide in cash what here is provided in kind may not always feel that they are able to afford to do so, particularly if they have very large families where different members may be prioritised. It may be more important to keep the man well fed so that he can work than to get the youngest child healthcare, because without the father working all the other children fall into malnutrition. I am not sure that the OECD is helpful in this regard as far as the UK is concerned. I want to pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I would encourage the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to be very careful indeed about going down the path that has to some degree been explored with asylum seekers in terms of vouchers rather than cash. Behind that has to lie a judgment about the appropriate expenditure of income, and a lofty, white, middle-class, educated judgment might be preferred over the judgments of other people, who may be in very different circumstances. I say that because I was very struck when I visited a social security office in my city of Norwich. I was talking to staff there—EOs and HEOs—about how they handled the social fund. It is a town with limited budgets and they had to prioritise, and we discussed how they prioritised their budgets from the social fund. They were mostly women and were very able, competent, kindly, well intentioned and completely scrupulous and professional. One would prioritise the lone parent who was struggling to buy white goods; another would prioritise the unmarried woman trying to help elderly parents in the home with heating costs; and someone else would prioritise a person with a disabled relative. However, the person who prioritised the lone parent was herself a lone parent. The person who prioritised the care of an older person was herself caring for her elderly mum. The person who prioritised the disabled person herself had a disabled member in the family. That taught me that there is a real problem in the exercise of discretion and with standards because you are tapping into the dowry of experience that people bring to a particular situation and the situations with which they themselves can identify. There was always a tension, from Donnison onwards—when, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, we moved away from supplementary benefits to income support—between the role of discretion and the role of standardisation. Whenever someone like Frank Field, whom I respect in many ways, calls for discretion, he is actually replacing not a perfect judgment by a decision-maker with the imperfect judgments of families but one form of discretion and personal experience with another. Sometimes it will be better, sometimes different and sometimes inferior. I urge the noble Lord, Lord Freud, to be very careful of going down that route. Obviously one wants a degree of flexibility to offer tailored support, and a lot of packages recommended by advisers and personal advisers have exactly that. Tailored support is very desirable, but once it becomes a form of replacing benefit entitlement, it is open to the judgment of others as to whether people should get help in kind. That is a dangerous, treacherous and slippery road, and I cannot begin to imagine the judicial reviews that would follow from those organisations. I hope that the noble Lord will distance himself from it because it will make the so-called solution worse than the problem that he currently identifies.