Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the intentions and objectives of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. I hope that the Minister will respond positively to his attempt to include parent consultation in the Bill. However, on this amendment, although I support the noble Lord’s objectives to a great extent, I am not quite sure that a public official such as the registrar of births, deaths and marriages is the most appropriate person to provide this information. His proposed paragraph (a) is on the parenting needs of children. We should start teaching people about that as teenagers in PSHE lessons at school. Moreover, a local authority’s children’s information service—in better local authorities, I think that it is called a ““family information service””—can provide quite a lot of information for parents about the support services available to them and groups and classes that will help them with their parental responsibilities and bringing up their children well. On the noble Lord’s new paragraph (b), it is not for the state to promote marriage or to brief against it. However, I certainly agree with his suggestion that strong and supportive family relationships are good for children. That, too, can be taught to young people before they ever become parents, which is highly desirable. New paragraph (c) relates to child welcoming and naming ceremonies. Again, I am not sure that the registrar is the person to provide that information. People are already doing it: I have been to a number of such ceremonies for the children of people who are not religious and who therefore do not want a baptism. I absolutely support the noble Lord’s objective in that he believes that such ceremonies would help to secure the commitment of the father to a continuing relationship with the child even where the parents are not married or are cohabiting. That is highly desirable. However, I just wonder whether women’s magazines or the bounty box that new mothers receive are perhaps a more appropriate place for ideas about different kinds of naming and commitment ceremonies. Perhaps they could be floated and discussed. They can be much more personalised than most baptisms that I have been to. They can be a happy event and certainly one at which the father can show his support and commitment to the child, even though he may not even live with them—although the ones that I have been to involved fathers who did live with the child. We are therefore generally supportive of what the noble Lord is trying to achieve but not quite sure that the amendment is the most appropriate way of doing it.