Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I, too, think that this is an interesting amendment, but I agree that it is out of place. If we are going to pick and choose what to put in the Bill for consideration by the commission being set up to advise the Secretary of State, I do not want it to be all Milton Friedman. That is not because I do not like Mr Milton Friedman’s work very much—although I do not—but because it would not be fair. If we are inviting the commission to consider a comprehensive set of proposals, I do not mind if this is one of them, because I concede that it is an issue that you cannot avoid in benefits systems—the iron triangle, the wooden square or whatever it is we are dealing with is inevitable. However, none of it is new; it has been around since 1979. Even before that, it was a problem for everyone. I was pleased to see the IFS work that led to the £19 billion estimate, but no one to whom I have spoken recently is thinking about income transfer as an exclusive means to deal with the problem—I would not advise any of our people to do that. It is nevertheless important work, because it demonstrates the length of the journey that has to be undertaken. There are some important spatial dimensions to all this. Let us take a labour market in a place such as Merthyr Tydfil—everyone chooses the example of Merthyr Tydfil, and the people there hate them for choosing it, because it stigmatises them, and I am not anti-Welsh at all. Downtown Glasgow will do—the noble Lord, Lord Martin, is not here, so I will not provoke him into another of his powerful speeches. If we compare the labour market in Reading to a very different situation where jobs are very hard to come by, there are dynamic changes. I have not read the 800 pages of Dynamic Benefits—I have got to page 24—but it is interesting and I encourage people to read it, slowly and over a period, because I am sure that it will pay dividends. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, has offered some genuinely interesting thoughts to the Committee. The benefits system has always been family-based. He seems to come from a more taxation-based approach. That is perfectly understandable, because that is his professional knowledge and experience, but you cannot escape the fact that more than one person is often involved in a family and second earners must be considered, so the disincentive effect is not as straightforward as some of his mathematical calculations and formulae would suggest. I encourage him to continue to argue the case and I am cast-iron certain that, if the commission does its job, it will be required to consider such issues in the way that he suggests. However, if the Government concede this amendment, a lot of other amendments will flow very quickly from my pen and the pens of others to change the balance. Obviously, it is a probing amendment and I am being a little facetious, but I do not think that we want to put this into the Bill. It is a fascinating discussion and we will need to tackle the issue in various different ways in the next Parliament, but it should not be in the Bill. I thank the noble Lord for his amendment, which is interesting, but we do not support it.