Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, this amendment reframes a proposal that we put forward in Committee. Essentially, I propose that the Government of the day report to Parliament on their success or otherwise in hitting the interim target of halving child poverty in 2010-11. That report should be prepared when figures are available. Before going into the reasons why this would be a valuable exercise, I will deal with the changes to the amendment since the Committee stage. The Minister’s arguments against our original amendment were based, as far as I can assess, entirely on the issue of timing. According to him, the household below average income data would not have been available for the original three-month deadline. It would not capture the impact of recent measures or that of Budget measures to come for this year. The Minister argued that the electoral cycle would create practical publication problems. He argued that annual reports on progress towards targets are anyway required from the Secretary of State to Parliament. However, this is not the same as a report on the specific target of halving child poverty in 2010. I will summarise the underlying arguments for why such a report would be valuable. I will aim to move quickly over ground already covered. Odd things have been happening in the battle against child poverty since 2004, when the improvements that we had seen ground to a halt and, on some measures, deteriorated. We debated at some length in Committee what the reasons for that might be. My overwhelming sense is that we are looking at a period in which real earnings growth was very disappointing, but we do not need to rerun those discussions in depth. However, we need a report at the appropriate time to put the various economic factors into context for this reason. The post-war periods in which child poverty has fallen have been rather rare—five or six years in the last 30, for instance. They are the exception rather than the rule. Some other major questions need answering. There was a reduction in relative poverty among children in workless households, but not in working households. How much has been caused by income transfers, rather than by tackling the causes of poverty? This is an area of particular interest to us, since our approach to the problem will be oriented towards tackling the causes of child poverty. This amendment would also give the Government the chance to accept measurements of performance against targets during its last 13 years in power. The Government have been accused of using diversionary tactics in this Bill by encouraging voters not to look at this performance and switching attention to the far horizon of 2020. They have also been accused of creating a poisoned pill for future Governments—they can ignore their own likely failure to achieve modest targets in benign conditions while lambasting the Government of the day for failing to achieve more difficult targets in a more difficult economy. Stephen Timms in another place acknowledged both the tougher nature of the 2020 targets and the more difficult economic environment that we face. I emphasise that I am not making these accusations; I am suggesting that the Government may find it convenient to tackle them head on by accepting responsibility for their own targets. I beg to move.