Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I thank those who have spoken in support of these amendments—in particular, the Minister. On Amendment 18, however, I cannot really accept his suggestion that if the commission were to consult children directly, that would duplicate what the Secretary of State was doing. Frankly, if the Secretary of State was doing all these consultations, the commission probably would not be needed. The commission is going to advise the Government on things that the Government may not have thought of and therefore will probably not have consulted on. Therefore, I cannot really accept that statement. On the matter of wishes and feelings, it is entirely appropriate that the commission—we are talking about the commission here, not the Government, the devolved Governments or the local authorities—should consult children directly about their wishes and feelings about aspects of poverty. Children may have strong feelings about certain manifestations of poverty that adults may not think they care about. We all know that children care about certain things more than we do, such as the brands of their trainers or their iPods, what colour school bag they have, how they wear their school tie and how short their school skirt is. Children have their own wishes and feelings about everything and there is no reason to believe that it would be any different about aspects of poverty, so I cannot really accept what the Minister said about that either. Does he want to reply?