Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I would like to deal first with the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. I have two points in connection with what she said. I should explain that my concern is really for what are called the hard-to-reach families. It is all very well to say that they are going to get this education at school but, as like as not, they have never been to school or they have not been listening to what was going on there. Many people would agree that prenatal and postnatal services can make a major contribution to the dissemination of information about parenting, which is what I had in mind. With regard to the registrar, my impression is that all the wonderful things that the Government are doing and making accessible are accessed by intelligent middle-class parents, while perhaps less intelligent middle-class parents—perhaps not only middle-class parents, but the hard-to-reach parents, too—are not necessarily getting these messages. Since the Government have introduced joint registration—they seem to have in mind an increased emphasis on its importance, with which I wholly agree—perhaps one could build on that with great caution as a point of contact, maybe one of the few points of contact, that the state will have with those parents. I was not really thinking of the registrar giving a lecture to the parents, but I thought that they might hand out something like a pamphlet about joint registration, as well as one on the availability of naming ceremonies. I was glad to hear from the Minister that such ceremonies exist in many local authority areas, but I wonder to what extent they are being used and made available to the hard-to-reach parents. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 40 withdrawn. Amendment 41 Moved by