Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, is right to remind the Committee that an academic debate about the equivalence scales is currently taking place. Although he did not mention it, it always strikes me as very odd when I am trying to work out—with or without help from other people—whether a particular benefit payment is above or below the 60 per cent line, when the key issue is whether the child is 13 or 14. At 14 they get a completely different equivalence scale—equivalent to an adult—from the one they get at 13. At that point, according to whether you are dealing with two children aged 8 and 13 or two children aged 8 and 14, it depends on whether the payment received is deemed below or above the 60 per cent line. There are clearly questions to explore. Perhaps the noble Lord will help me with this issue. All the reports seem to say in common that within the benefits system couples without children—married couples, cohabiting couples, couples in stable relationships—are overprovided for in the benefits system rather than the reverse. Does not this suggest that he and others have misunderstood the issue of the marriage penalty, or the couple penalty, in benefit provision when, on his own evidence, they are already overprovided for compared to single people, such as lone parents with children? Does this not mean that he and his party have to rethink their whole policy area as a result of the helpful analysis he has given today?