Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the Minister has probably just shot my fox. However, in view of the fact that we will enter an uncertain period in the next few weeks, I am going to move my amendment, albeit as briefly as I can. I will not expect the Minister to provide a very full answer if he is going to come back on Report with something that will cover these points. I just want to ensure that we will get to Report stage. Who knows what will happen? Maybe if we can finish today, we might. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that measures in the child poverty strategies will be assessed against the impact that they will have on children and parents by household type. All the categories in the amendment are within the HBAI. The analysis will allow decisions to be made on the basis of whether they would help those most at risk of poverty in the long term and drive real progress in lifting these groups out of poverty. It will also ensure that resources and efforts across different policy areas impact those in greatest need, in addition to those who will fall just under the target income levels. We have discussed this at some length in Committee. The amendment was suggested by the End Child Poverty campaign, which rightly, in our view, believes that the Secretary of State must consider how measures taken in each of the building blocks impact on different household types. I was interested that the Minister said that he was going to introduce a new building block and I look forward to seeing the amendment. My amendment would ensure that the analysis of winners and losers under each measure was considered and would pinpoint where help was most needed. This is particularly important following the recent report from the National Equality Panel which shows that the inequality gap has widened even further from the 1980s to the present day. The week before last, during our debates on Clause 6, I spoke about families with either a disabled child or a disabled adult. The figures show that, after housing costs, 44 per cent of children in households where there is disability are in poverty compared with only 28 per cent where no one in the family has a disability. It costs three times as much to bring up a disabled child as it does to bring up a non-disabled child, and current levels of disability benefits do not reflect the full costs of raising a disabled child. I believe that there is a lot of misunderstanding about this. The non-disabled world thinks that a lot more money and organised help is available than there really is. Many parents of disabled children simply do not complain about a lack of money or help because they are too busy or too tired to do so. Disability living allowances—I declare an interest—are terrific benefits, but with a severely disabled child they only go so far. A severely disabled child might go to a special school, but what happens in the holidays? It is very difficult indeed to get appropriate childcare for an older disabled child, so the parent has to be available in the holidays. It is little wonder that many parents work only intermittently or, at best, have low-paid jobs. As I have said before, only 16 per cent of mothers with disabled children work compared with over 60 per cent of those with non-disabled children. I take the point the Minister made in his response the week before last to my amendment about the local needs assessment picking up information about the need for childcare for older disabled children. I doubt, however, that there are enough carers with this specialised skill throughout the country and I just hope that more are being trained. The next category in the amendment refers to ethnic groups. In 2007-08, children from certain black and minority ethnic groups, such as children in Pakistani or Bangladeshi households, were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as the average child. Some groups also underachieve educationally and the employment rate among some ethnic minorities is 60 per cent compared with 75 per cent for all working age adults. Listing household types, as the amendment does, provides flexibility in, for example, assessing the impact of measures by, "““economic status and family type””," would require the impact to be shown for lone parents who work part time, full time and not at all, as well as couple households ranging from both parents in full-time work to neither in full-time work. I believe this is what the Minister said the fifth building block might show. Existing evidence from the HBAI datasets demonstrates which groups have the highest risk of child poverty, including, as I have said, over half of children in certain ethnic minorities who are in this category and one in three children living in large families. However, some of these groups make up only a small proportion of the total population of children living in poverty and, therefore, meeting the targets will require action to tackle child poverty targeted both at those most at risk and those who make up a larger proportion living in poverty. The amendment allows both aspects to be considered in developing the strategy. Over time, those most at risk of poverty may well change and current measures for HBAI do not capture all children. We do not want to exclude groups who might be more at risk in the future and it is important for datasets to be developed to include as many children as possible. As the British Household Panel Survey is being expanded to include more households, this is a good opportunity for the Government to build a much more rigorous evidence base on those families and children most at risk of poverty. I beg to move.