Child Poverty Bill

I thank noble Lords for their indulgence in allowing me to pull up this one issue. If the Minister had had more time, he would have been more expansive when we discussed it last month. The amendment seeks to concentrate on the collection of statistics on marriage. As I say, the reference to ““marital status”” was abandoned on government forms in 2005. It is not a difficult statistic to collect—we have collected it, I suspect, for hundreds of years—and it has only recently been stopped. The amendment is designed to allow the statistics to be collected again.