Child Poverty Bill

I thank the noble Lord for that full answer. He is showing his accountancy background when he thinks about his fringe benefits, on which I have no doubt he has done many calculations. This area is somewhat problematic for the welfare system. When people do the back-to-work calculations and often do not include the passported benefits, the adviser doing the calculations says, "Yes, it is worth you going back to work", but the person gets back home and thinks, "Well, actually, I’m not sure"—because they will lose out on quite a few other things that have not been calculated. If we reformed the system on the lines that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, discussed earlier, with higher disregards and so on, getting monetary values for these figures when trying to sort out the system may be a very important part of it. I would make the point to her that it is one thing to have a presumption that we have some benefits in cash and some in kind. That is the state today. One worries about setting up a targeting system; one drives the system down one road or the other over 10 years. The noble Baroness will be more aware than I am of the daily pressures on politicians and bureaucracy to achieve particular targets. If they are not drawn up very precisely here, they will have effects.