Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is quite right to table an amendment to the Short Title and I support him entirely. We have had long discussions about the difference the Bill will make to children suffering from deprivation and at several points the Minister has stated that it is only a small part of the arsenal of legislation that relates to child poverty. He is quite right. The vast majority of powers, duties and obligations that fall on the Government in relation to the welfare of children continue unchanged. Added to this is the undeniable fact that the first six clauses of the Bill are not directly related to child poverty. The targets measure household income as a proxy and, although there might be some correlation between the experience of a child and the level of household income, in many cases it is not a perfect proxy. The Government’s research shows that some children living in low-income households are not materially deprived and, for many reasons, that there are children who experience worrying levels of deprivation, neglect and abuse despite their parents being in receipt of much higher levels of income. The noble Lord’s amendment is therefore to be commended on the grounds of accuracy. The Bill is drafted around financial targets, but those targets do not measure child poverty, they measure household income. I hope that the commission, the UK strategy and the new requirements on local authorities will all contribute to greater levels of co-ordination in an area of policy that should always be a very high priority, but does the Minister think that this improvement in the behaviour of government will be the result of the four targets? Does he think that Clauses 7 to 30 will be ineffective without Clauses 1 to 6? Either he believes that statutory targets significantly change government behaviour and priorities—in which case I am concerned about the distortion that solely financial targets will have on government policy—or he believes that the meat of the Bill lies in the later provisions, in which case exactly what will the four targets, all of which are already measured, achieve? The four statutory targets measuring household income will not be what motivates a significant improvement in child poverty levels over the next 10 years, and we will be doing a great disservice to those struggling every day to find and help children suffering from deprivation if we pretend that they will.