Child Poverty Bill

I want to step into this discussion. I agree with everything that has been said about this very difficult and vexed question. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, drew attention to the comments in the OECD report on the danger of ill-thought-out targets not serving children well. Of course, that is something we all agree with, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, was kind enough to highlight that it is a concern that my noble friend and I share. This is a tremendously interesting debate. From my limited experience of working with children—I am not sure whether I can say this—I sense that some children have a healthier life because they get free school meals. Food is given to them. They may have breakfast when they get to school or something that they would not have at home, so these things can be tremendously important. I recall attending a conference recently at the Family and Parenting Institute in nearby Church House. An academic from a continental country described to us the type of in-kind support offered to new mothers. She showed us a photograph of the support offered, such as nappies for a year, different sets of clothes and all sorts of apparatus. The interesting thing for the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, and others to consider is that the families could choose to have that package or choose to have the money, but they would get a lot more for their buck with the package, so they tended to choose that. To some degree, that gets around the issue of outsiders making judgments about what is or is not good for people. However, I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, that, by focusing too narrowly on financial matters and not giving attention to the benefit of providing services in kind, we may not be giving the best service to these families. One other thing that comes out of the debate is the importance of people on the front line having excellent training. We must recruit the best, and their supervisors should also be experienced to help them to reflect on their practice. A key thing with social workers is that it is easy to extrapolate from one’s own narrow experience and say, "This is right for this family because that is what happened in my family". It is easy to bring one’s personal, narrow experience to bear on the lives of others, especially when one has such an influence on those people’s lives. I am thinking about social workers. They may make misjudgments and that is why we need to recruit and retain the best people on the front line. We must give them excellent support so that they make judgments that are, as far as possible, in the best interests of their service users. Another concern is that we use targets too heavily in this country. We measure things to the nth degree and have the most measured children in the world in terms of education results. We do not rely on the judgment of people on the front line. A recent example is that we have not valued CAFCASS officers—the old guardians who were the elite of social work. They used to work in courts providing advice to judges, which was very much valued. With the best intentions, we have driven out many of those professionals and have arrived at a bureaucratic approach that is not delivering what we wish for. I am sorry to digress but there is a reasonable case for concern here and I look forward to the Minister’s response.