Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I oppose the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, would readily acknowledge that it is important for legislation to be compatible with previous legislation and not to have unintended consequences. He knows as well as we all do that the Welfare Reform Act 2009 provides a framework for dealing with claimants who are dependent on drugs by requiring them to attend assessments in order to continue to be entitled to benefits. This was recommended by clinicians as the best approach for people dependent on drugs in order to ensure that they get into treatment at the earliest possible moment, thus also getting people back into employment, reducing the cost to the taxpayer and reducing the cost of crime. The amendment could be used to provide a completely different method of reducing benefits to those families among whom there is a person dependent on drugs. That would be entirely unacceptable and would cut across the Welfare Reform Act. Any such reductions have profound unintended consequences, such as exacerbating the criminal activities of the individual concerned. However, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, makes an important point about the person who is to receive the benefits to which the household is entitled. I think that the Committee will agree that children of parents who are dependent on drugs are at risk of being deprived of the money that they need to pay for food and everything else. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, will be interested in that aspect of the amendment. In this context, I give credit to the enormous amount of work that the Government have done on dealing with drug addiction. I was at a seminar about drugs this morning. I had not been fully aware of the extraordinary success of the drug addiction policies. I heard about someone who had been committing more than 1,000 crimes a year but wrote to a Minister saying, ““Your people need to be recognised for the amazing work that they do. I now commit no crimes””. That sort of work has gone on under the Government and needs to be recognised, but I think that the business of the allocation of benefits is also very important.