Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s amendment and mine are very similar. I am glad that we are generally in agreement on this side of the Committee on this point. The question of the appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny was raised in another place but I hope that the Minister will give us fuller answers than my honourable colleagues were able to extract during those debates. There appear to be two different views of the commission running through the discussions on the Bill and, indeed, through the discussions we are now having. The first model, the one most people prefer—it is the preferred model on this side of the Committee—is of a strong independent body with teeth, established to give credible advice, impartial assessment of the success of a strategy and, where needed, appropriate criticism of government policy. The second model is that of an expert umbrella group, established to collate and analyse data and instigate research in the areas that are lacking. Essentially, the commission under that format would be a valuable resource for the Government to utilise as and when they decided that it was needed. These two bodies are of course very different, and the Government have given us rather mixed signals on which model they intend to establish. These provisions and the statements that the Government have given lead me to think that model two is what they are after, but the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions described the commission’s role as facilitating the production of a strategy to enable the Secretary of State to fulfil her duties. This does not sound like a body that will ever cause the Government any trouble. The Government even had to be persuaded to allow the commission the power to commission its own research—a provision that I welcome and which we will discuss later. Giving the chair of the commission the chance to have his appointment confirmed by Parliament would raise his or her profile to a position in which we could be assured that any advice or criticism that the commission might have to offer would be given the attention that it deserves by the Government. It would also confirm the impartiality of the appointment. Despite what the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, says, accusations of cronyism are finding fertile ground among the public these days, and would be particularly damaging in this case. The commission will run across more than one Parliament, and its advice will be on measures that lend themselves to a rapid assessment of success or failure. Protection from accusations of being unfairly biased for or against the prevailing critical winds will be invaluable.