Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have taken part in the debate; it has been an important and significant period in the course of the Committee’s work. I have been particularly struck by the powerful medical evidence given by the noble Lord, Lord Rea, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and I am grateful to them. I shall go away and reflect on what they have said. If there are other reports in the pipeline in early February, we might have the advantage of seeing them before the Committee finishes its work on the Bill. They might even describe, for example, the benefits of adding folic acid to bread. We could perhaps even make chips with folic acid, but I am not sure about Coca-Cola. However, these are serious points and I shall go away and reflect on the powerful evidence we have heard in that direction. On the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, the HBAI proxies for standards of living are too patchy. It is clear from the deprivation indices that people cannot afford many of the things on them, although they do not say by how much they are short. However, I should say to the noble Baroness that it might be possible to expand some of the HBAI proxies and I shall go away and think about that. They are not adequate at the moment—we may disagree about that—but she has a gem of an idea that I am willing to explore. There is room to trade and I am willing to think again about the issue. At the moment, the HBAI proxies do not cover the full gamut of a family unit budget. Do the Government feel confident that the 60 per cent median poverty figure is enough to live on? It clearly is not enough for people who are in persistent poverty for three out of four years. I am not saying for a nanosecond that we should adopt minimum income standards as targets for benefit payments; I am simply saying that if the figures had been available to us today, we would be in a much better position to make an informed judgment about what needs to be done. I agree that I have not really worked this out in that it is not costed—people should not hold that against me or I will sue them—but if you could show that a typical family with a 10 year-old and a four year-old child were a long way below the minimum income standard for three out of four years, then I would look to the interesting ideas put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, as a proxy for targeting. Such people need remedial help. If they are a long way below minimum income standards for three out of four years and have a 10 year-old and a four year-old, they are in trouble. The spend-to-save philosophy that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has valuably given the nation enables you to be confident in saying to people who ask, "Why does this family get help and not that one?", that you are using resources in a way that is understandable and explainable. That is another club in your golfing bag, or whatever the figure of speech is, and not having it leaves us flying blind in a way that I do not think is useful.