Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I have reservations about this amendment. I understand the intent, which I think is decent, but I would like to explain my reservations, which we discussed in Committee. The first is to make a distinction between information and target. As the noble Baroness rightly said, the information is already there in the major document which will steer any commission working through the statistics. For a house with below average income, on the left-hand page are the statistics on before housing, on the right-hand page should be the statistics on after housing income. The statistics are publicly available, and will inform the considerations of the commission to the extent which is appropriate. They are there as information, and nothing that the noble Baroness has said today will take that away. Why should the information therefore not go one step further and be a target? My problem here is, as the noble Baroness confesses, that it is London-centric. House prices and rents are much higher in London, but the offset, particularly if you are looking for a part-time job, is infinitely cheaper transport costs. For example, housing costs in East Anglia are between a half to two-thirds of those of London, but transport costs can be three times higher. People can spend £50 or £70 a week catching trains between Yarmouth and Norwich every day, even for part-time jobs. If we are going to have households’ after housing costs included, then in all fairness, you have to include transport costs because rents are high where transport costs are low and rents are low where transport costs are high. There is almost a perfect connection between the two. If we take account, as a target, of households’ after housing costs, we should simultaneously abate that by the other real expenditure which offsets the housing costs. In rural areas which do not have the Tube—glory be, that would be wonderful—or sometimes even buses but perhaps the occasional train, people are more likely to have to rely on an old banger, with all the costs of insurance, so those transport costs would need to be taken into account. If my noble friend was willing to go down the route suggested by the noble Baroness to have this as a target as opposed to having information, I hope that, in all fairness, transport costs would be included. Once you start doing that, we are on a slippery slope to widening the reach of yet another target in this Bill.