Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I am a great fan of Jonathan Bradshaw and the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has done the Committee a service by bringing this rather technical but nevertheless important subject to our attention. There is a value in the consensus on the OECD figure but the noble Lord is quite right to say that there is no scientific basis behind it. Presumably the Child Poverty Commission would be able to commission figures of its own and, if McClements’s or any other figures were better, presumably it could make it its business to find out what they are and implement them. In this country we have a body of academic experts in this field which is second to none across Europe. There are many experts in the Scandinavian countries but they come from a different environment, as do many other European experts. We have got good people and there are better scales; I do not see why the commission cannot take advantage of that. I am sure the Minister will confirm that there is nothing in the Bill that would stop the commission looking at other equivalence measures, if it felt that children were being under-represented. It is a technical business. I am not a statistician by any stretch of the imagination, but I have serious doubts, and I concur with the view of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, on this issue. We should look at it very carefully during the passage of the Bill.