Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 1A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Freud. The aim of the Bill is to drive the long-term sustainable eradication of child poverty, ensuring that tackling child poverty is a priority for everyone. We will continue to be held to account on the 2010 target, but this Bill is focused on ensuring that we do not lose sight of the long-term goal. The Bill increases the accountability of the Government with regard to their child poverty goal. It sets out a rigorous process of reporting and accountability that will hold the Government to account. It also creates the Child Poverty Commission, which will provide valuable expertise and advice to feed into the reports and the strategies on progress. The Bill does not weaken our commitment to tackling child poverty; it strengthens it. The amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish a report as soon as is reasonably practicable after the end of the 2010 target year and no later than 30 June 2012, setting out an assessment of progress towards the 2010 child poverty target as defined in public service agreement 9—fewer than 1.7 million children in qualifying households living below the 60 per cent median income threshold. As I explained in Committee, Clause 8 requires the Secretary of State to publish a strategy setting out the measures that will be taken to meet the four child poverty targets in Clauses 2 to 5. To ensure that the Secretary of State reports on the progress in tackling child poverty, Clause 13 requires him to produce and lay before Parliament an annual progress report setting out the progress that has been made in tackling child poverty. Subsection (1)(a) of Clause 13 requires that the annual reports report progress against each of the targets. The first strategy must be laid within 12 months of Royal Assent and the first report must be laid within a year of the anniversary of the strategy being published. This will report on progress against our relative poverty target, from which it will be clear what the progress is on the 2010 target. In addition to this, the HBAI data on the relative low income target are published every year, so progress can be tracked in that way. As the noble Lord, Lord Freud, said, this is not the time to revisit all the arguments and analysis about what has happened since 2004 and the reasons why there are challenges in meeting the child poverty targets. Government action and investment over the past decade have stopped and reversed the upward trend in child poverty. Whereas the number of children in poverty more than doubled between 1979 and 1997, 500,000 children have been lifted out of child poverty since 1998-9. There were 2.9 million children living in relative poverty in 2007-08. Absolute poverty has been halved. We expect the measures introduced in and since Budget 2007 to lift around a further 550,000 children out of poverty. Although this is still some way from the 2010 target, it represents real and significant progress since 1997. This amendment does not add any value. The Government are happy to be held to account for our record on child poverty. Indeed, we cannot possibly avoid being held to account for it. The 2010 target is tough, as it should be, and we need to bear in mind that we started from a base where child poverty had risen for some 20 years. However, as noble Lords would like to see progress against the 2010 target reported clearly—a view that I share—I do not propose to resist the amendment.