Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, in his response, the Minister begged the point at least three times that this was a child poverty Bill and therefore we must keep it confined to child poverty. The reality is that it is no such thing. If you were to define it correctly—here I am following a point that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, made on Tuesday—it is not a child poverty Bill but a relative households income Bill. That is what the targets measure. They do not measure child poverty, but the relative poverty of households. On that basis it becomes quite ingenuous to argue that you cannot accept particular things because they do not deal directly with child poverty. These targets do not deal with child poverty. I made it quite clear when I introduced this amendment that it was trying to eliminate an inconsistency in the Bill, which moves from targets that are based on relative household income—a target of a 60 per cent median income for households. That is not dealt with in these clauses. Of course, the relative household income Bill is a rather less exciting title and may not have appealed as much to the Government. If we are talking about child poverty, a Bill which confines itself to income targets of households and ignores child well-being virtually entirely in the targets—as noble Lords know, we are trying to put such targets into the Bill—misses a huge opportunity. I am most prepared to stand corrected on drafting. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, cavilled, though that is not a nice word—