Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I support the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. We have said this before. I have written various books, for my sins. What infuriates me most when they are being reviewed is when the reviewer says, "I wish you had written a different book". I say, "Sod that! That wasn’t the book I was seeking to write". In a sense, that is part of the debate today. No one challenges what the noble Lord is saying. No one denies that these things can add to the misery of children. So can the mental ill health and violence of parents, and so can a whole series of issues, which have to be addressed and may be addressed in parallel. That is not to say that the Bill should not remain focused, otherwise we will not address these targets; they will get lost sight of in a wider approach to well-being. I have another reason to hesitate. I am not particularly accusing the noble Lord of bad faith, but I worry when I read some of the reports coming from the Centre for Social Justice. By fixing on some of these factors and others like them, it seems to suggest that the lack of moral fibre in parents is the driving force of the poverty of the children who then experience deprivation. Therefore, it is not our job to transfer money; it is our job to moralise the parents into behaving in the ways that we would like to see, which conveniently gets us off the hook of redistributing money, because it is the parents’ own fault. I am not suggesting that the noble Lord is advancing that argument today, but I have seen it run in columns of newspapers time and again, when research such as this tries to suggest that it is in some sense due to the fecklessness, lack of moral fibre, unwillingness to work, poor relationships and failure to marry—this, that and the other—of the parents, and that that dowry to their children gives them poverty. I do not doubt that those are contributory factors in many ways, but to say that they are the causes of poverty and that income is merely the symptom can, if you are not careful, lead you down the slippery slope of saying that it is the parents’ own fault and that if only they bucked up and received a proper, decent moral education and if only we could fix all that, we would not have to address children’s poverty, because it would get sorted out in the wash.