Child Poverty Bill

What I have to say is very complimentary to what the noble Baroness has just said, and may be slightly repetitive. However, it gives me an opportunity to cover further that vital stage in child development—the earliest stage, with the foetus in utero. Healthy babies, as the noble Baroness said, are produced by healthy mothers, particularly adequately nourished mothers. Many studies have shown that the most critical phase of development—the foetal environment at the very beginning of pregnancy—is the time when damaging effects can occur and is the most vulnerable time for the child. It is the time when the heart and cardiovascular system and the central nervous system are formed from the primitive streak, before the foetus is recognisable as a future human being. This occurs in the first few weeks of gestation, often before the mother realises that she is pregnant. That is why it is so important to ensure that not only mothers and women who know they are pregnant but also potential mothers—that is, all women of child-bearing age—have sufficient income to buy an adequate diet. The human foetus is quite an effective parasite. It will take most of the things that it wants from its mother’s tissues but if the cupboard is bare, the foetus will be wanting. The noble Baroness pointed out, in particular, the effects of anencephaly and spina bifida resulting from folate deficiency. If that can occur, then other vital nutrient deficiencies are also likely to have serious effects. I should like to point out the possible effect of a lack of long-chained polyunsaturated fatty acids, found most richly in fish, on the subsequent IQ of babies. The ALSPAC study of 14,000 babies from pregnancy through to their early teenage years—I think that that is their current age, although I am not sure exactly how old they are—showed that those aged eight whose mothers had consumed very little fish during pregnancy had significantly lower IQs than those whose mothers had eaten quite a lot of fish. Of course, many social factors were involved but a lot of care was taken to allow for any bias based on things such as social class, education, smoking and so on. The study needs to be repeated but it is important and it points to the fact that we have to be very careful that, regarding the very young foetus, those nutrients are easily available to prospective mothers. That is why it is so important for women to have an adequate budget to buy the diet that they need. What this diet should contain and what it costs has, as other noble Lords have said, been the subject of very careful research by the Family Budget Unit at York, as well as by the Nutrition and Public Health Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, together with a number of other units. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, the York team calculated that the minimum cost in 2008 for a healthy diet was £43.73 a week for a single person living alone. Of course, both noble Lords who have spoken so far have pointed out how very difficult it is for a person living on present levels of benefit to meet those costs when there are so many other demands on their meagre resources, even to survive, let alone to lead a life as a useful member of society. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, the cost of housing produces a particularly heavy burden in London. Although there is housing benefit, it is often not adequate and plenty of other costs are not covered. Therefore, inevitably less is spent on food, which means that the diet contains fewer of the vital nutrients which are particularly important in early pregnancy. That is why it is so important to ensure that benefit levels and the minimum wage are based on realistic, carefully researched estimates of need and not on arbitrary or uprated historical levels.