Child Poverty Bill

I found the Rowntree study, A minimum income standard for Britain in 2009, an extremely interesting document. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, has just mentioned it. One thing that it said was that a full-time earner on the minimum wage cannot achieve the minimum income standard, which it calculated as £13,900 per single person—although, for the purposes of this Bill, we are more concerned about families with children. The researchers said that for a couple with two children it is reckoned to be £27,600. I was interested in what they counted as the minimum income standard, and found that it was rather democratic; they asked the public what they thought and came up with a figure. I did not realise that research could be quite so democratic. They said that even though benefits went up last year by 5 to 6 per cent, the amount needed to achieve a minimum standard of living also rose by about 5 per cent after rent, so the adequacy of benefits relative to the standard did not improve. They made the point that someone on the minimum income spends a greater than average portion of their budget on food, domestic fuel and public transport, for which prices have risen by 7 to 12 per cent. They talked about the poverty line of 60 per cent median income, which is the figure in the Bill. That may be a rough and ready benchmark, but it was considered to be quite a suitable one. They went on to say that the cost of living was going up faster for someone around the minimum income standard than for the average family, so the only way in which people on benefits would improve their position was if median real incomes fell. We know that the Government’s position for some time has been that benefits should be only a short-term shelter for people before they get a job. If they are given any more money, they will be more reluctant to get a job—that is part of the Government’s reasoning. Even if they are on employment and support allowance or incapacity benefit, unless they are very ill or disabled, they will be expected to do something in return for benefits. But that misses the point that there will always be more than 1 million children living in households which are wholly dependent on benefit, because their parents are long-term unemployed or temporarily unemployed or perhaps become disabled or go to prison—or because of domestic violence. Here are some rather depressing figures. Children whose parents claim JSA have a 70 per cent risk of living in poverty. If their parents are on income support, it is a 54 per cent risk; and if their parents claim working tax credit, it is a 29 per cent risk. We do not say that benefits must immediately be raised to the minimum income standard, but there should be some estimation of what it is. The Secretary of State should consider what it is when setting out the measures to be taken under the UK strategy. It is worth pointing out that benefits in this country are not particularly generous, contrary to popular belief. I come back to my noble friend’s question at the beginning: if other countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Germany and Canada, know how much money is enough to live on, why do we not?