Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the intention of this amendment is to explore the relationship between child poverty and child well-being. It is interesting to see how many experts tell us that child well-being as a whole is a more important measure than child poverty. Child poverty is an odd concept because we cannot measure it directly. Children do not, on the whole, have income or wealth, so we measure a proxy in the shape of those households which contain children. It is likely that a proportion of any extra resources put into those households will not go into improving child well-being. Either it will be diverted or cash adjustments may simply not be very effective in improving well-being. At the risk of irritating the Minister, I remind him that, in its formal targets at least, the Bill is not exactly a child poverty Bill; it is a relative household income Bill. The question that this amendment poses is: if we are interested in our children, should we concentrate harder on their well-being? This is important because the set of targets selected here will drive particular interventions. However, the Child Poverty Action Group, in its recent document Coping with Complexity, tells us that, ""if the aim is to achieve the greatest improvement in wellbeing overall, improving the home and neighbourhood environment is likely to be more effective than reducing material deprivation"." I was concerned to read Professor Jonathan Bradshaw’s paper on child poverty and well-being, which points out that, ""the child poverty rate explains only about 30 per cent of the variation in overall well-being"." I quote his conclusion at length because it is very interesting: ""The relative child poverty rate which has been adopted by the EU as the only child related primary or secondary indicator of social inclusion is not adequate to represent variations in child well-being across the EU25. The proportion of children in jobless households is worse. Educational attainment, which might be adopted, is even worse. There are some single indicators that are highly correlated with child well-being and for which there is data across the EU25. However it might be better for the EU to adopt the kind of multi-dimensional index of child well-being of the kind explored"—" in the paper he is writing. He concludes that what those indices show is: ""The results are disappointing for a UK audience. Despite the efforts that are now being made to abolish child poverty and through Every Child Matters improve the well-being of children, the UK finds itself resolutely at the wrong end of the international league table. This may of course be lag effect—much of the well-being data is old and when more recent data become available we may be moving up the league table"." Professor Bradshaw concludes ominously: ""There is a long way to go"." He states: ""Given the wealth of the UK, our children are doing badly"," and that the UK, ""again is notable for not getting the child well-being that its spending deserves"." I shall not dwell for too long on the embarrassment of the relative position of the UK in the UNICEF table of 21 rich countries in 2007. We were 18th in terms of material well-being—only Ireland, Hungary and Poland were worse; 13th in health and safety—that is the only half-way respectable performance; 18th in education; bottom in family and peer relations; bottom in behaviours and risk; and 20th in subjective well-being, which is bottom because the US was unscored in that category. At Second Reading, the Minister said that much of these data are old. I feel guilty saying that that is a classic Civil Service-type answer given the fantastic civil servants in this Room—I think there are still eight of them—so I shall say that it is a civil-servants-not-in-this-Room-type answer, and I am sure the Minister felt uneasy delivering it. It would be more worrying if we were to achieve the child poverty target and then find that we still have the lowest child well-being in the rich world. That is the problem with targets. If they are proxies, you do not always get what you want.