Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, we come to an important part of the Bill. As we know, in Clause 8, under the heading "UK strategies", subsection (2) clarifies what the Government are to do in driving towards the 2010 and 2020 targets. Subsection (2) sets out a twin strategy. It looks at the duty to ensure that the targets are met, as we discussed earlier; it also, in paragraph (b) refers to the need to ensure, ""as far as possible that children in the United Kingdom do not experience socio-economic disadvantage"." In that regard, Amendment 27 refers to "minimum incomes". I note that there is another equally important and weighty amendment grouped with Amendment 27, so I hope we can spend a little time looking at what we should be doing to make these strategies as well focused and effective as possible. I have been looking at this area for most of my parliamentary career, in another place and here. One thing that has always bedevilled everyone is the length of time that it takes for some of these statistics to come through. The Family Resources Survey and the General Household Survey are, by definition, complicated survey work. No one is complaining that the social scientists who do it are sitting on their hands; it just takes a lot of time to disinter the meaning from the figures and cross-tabulate the results. When we get to 2010, it will be another two years before we know whether the Government have made a mark. If we cannot speed these things up and do not have a real-time understanding of what is happening in low-income households throughout the UK, it is a matter of concern. There is a well worked methodology for minimum income standards. In 1998, the Family Budget Unit produced a minimum income standard for families with young children called "Low Cost but Acceptable". The Centre for Research in Social Policy in Loughborough and the Family Budget Unit in York have recently created a methodology that scientifically looks, in real time, at what low-income households need on a variety of indicators. It has to be an ongoing survey, but the Family Budget Unit has been able to get sponsors to do it only intermittently. When it is done, we know what standards must be met in order to keep people in a sustainable state of well-being over the longer term. It is an idea that is worth considering. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has, from time to time, sponsored some of this work. A July 2008 report A minimum income standard for Britain: what people think included a survey on public attitudes on a minimum income standard for Britain. It took ordinary people from the family types that it was studying. With expert support, they intensively discussed what they thought should be in a low-cost but acceptable budget and what should be left out. The survey found a remarkable degree of unanimity. For example, the group was quite easily able to define what a minimum income standard would look like, were it to be set up. The definition was: ""A minimum standard of living in Britain today includes, but is more than just, food, clothes and shelter. It is about having what you need in order to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society"." The group looked at what constituted an acceptable income for different family types. I stress that we are looking at needs, not wants. There are any number of standards that would be wish lists. The report listed minimum requirements to sustain families with children, retired families and families without children. There were four basic categories: warmth and shelter; health and diet; social integration; and avoidance of stress. That work is important in indicating how far short we are of acceptable standards of living. In this July 2008 dataset—which is now out of date—pension credit couples who claimed their full means-tested benefits came up to a minimum but acceptable standard, which is a measure of success for which the Government deserve some credit, subject to the condition that the means-tested benefits have to be applied for, and we all know about the difficulty of getting people to claim their benefits. There is a reasonably scientific method of answering the question, "How much is enough?". We do not do that, which is a great shame. If we are going to have a meaningful strategy, this should be an important part of that work and that strategy. There are different ways of applying the test of how much is enough. You can look at social indicators, attitude surveys and focus groups. The budget standards methodology that the family budget unit has worked out is a very useful tool at the very least. Noble Lords may know that there is quite a wealth of international experience in countries such as Australia, North America, the Netherlands and Sweden. Minimum income standards have been a productive feature of their tax benefit debates for years. No one is suggesting that any of these states reach the position of being able to pay everyone a minimum acceptable standard benefit level, although some of the Scandinavian countries come close. The standards are a valuable tool and they are usefully deployed in debates in those countries. The European Union in 1992 recommended that sister European states in the then European Union should adopt this standard as a useful indicator in the course of their national policy-setting discussions. Although to my knowledge this has never been done, the minimum income standards could help us to understand regional differences. I said earlier in the proceedings of the Committee that I am fearful that, no matter what we do, the problems in London are so severe that unless we solve them, we are not going to solve the larger problem. I am talking in terms of housing costs in particular, and other things as well, because households predisposed to low income are in a higher proportion in the London area. Regional figures, using this quite sophisticated technology and methodology, could help us to understand how we need to deploy some of the policies regionally differently. You would expect someone like me from Scotland to say that the west coast and Glasgow have a different set of circumstances to those you find in terms of poverty on the east coast and in the capital city of Edinburgh. Again, drilling into these actual budget levels at a regional dimension throughout the United Kingdom would make the application of the policy more effective. I hope that there might be different ways in different regions to deal with different parts of the problem as they are seen in different regions. Mentioning Glasgow reminds me that nutritional standards on the west coast of Scotland are terrible, compared to anywhere. I am a Glaswegian and I had 18 years of it, and I am only just starting to recover now. We need to pay close attention to nutritional experts, who are some very clever people who do some expert work, for example in London university. Some of the minimum acceptable costs can be cleverly and accurately pinned down, so there is no excuse for saying that we do not really know what we need to do. We know exactly what we need to do in terms of nutritional standards for young people, particularly children at a formative age. I am conscious of the excellent work that the Zacchaeus trust and others have done to try to point that out. I have two further points. First, the minimum income standards have something else that commend them uniquely; they are sustainable. If you can get families near to a modest but acceptable level of living in terms of the budget standards that they need for food and clothing and so on, and, indeed, in terms of the other half of it, the variable costs that make up a budget—insurance, rent and so on—you can be fairly safe in the knowledge that they are on a sustainable plane unless something dramatic happens. You cannot see that when looking only at the financial level of benefit because you do not know what is behind it—the levels of debt and all the other circumstances—and so it is important to have a sustainable, acceptable living standards measure. If this is to be done, it has to be on an ongoing basis so that the trends can be mapped and people can see where they are heading in real time and in a useful way. If we are serious about a strategy between now and 2020, this is one of the most important things that the Government could do in order to convince me that they are serious not only about sorting out the problem in the fullness of time but about doing so on an ongoing basis. I beg to move.