Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I thought we were going to end on a note of consensus, but seemingly not. Noble Lords may be aware that the title was discussed in the other place where honourable Members sought to change the name of the Bill to include family poverty. I do not deny that the measure of household income is key to the targets in Clauses 1 to 6, but I do not accept the assertion that they do not relate to child poverty, although we accept that the proxy is not absolute. On that point, at various stages during the course of our Committee deliberations we sought to understand the noble Lord’s position in relation to those targets. At one stage he chided me because I suggested that he was not committed to them and that that misrepresented his view. However, we have heard subsequently in a number of debates a loosening of what I thought to be at that earlier stage a commitment to the targets set out in the Bill. That is by way of an aside.