Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, may I briefly raise a couple of points that have been mentioned in the course of this high quality debate? First, people might think this is a technical issue and the noble Lord, Lord Best, has demonstrated that it is indeed a very important technical issue, because when you look at the way in which the difference between before and after housing costs affects individual households, it has a dramatic effect. I am not making a claim for this amendment on the basis of technicalities. I have studied this Bill. At the beginning, I thought that it was not very useful in terms of making any difference. After listening to the very good debates in Committee, I changed my mind. This amendment, however, is a litmus test for me for a number of reasons. As my noble friend said in introducing her amendment, it captures the levels of poverty that we are going to have to address to be successful by 2020 at the lower levels of household income. I am convinced about that. If the Government are only going to use before housing costs that is a change; to date the pressure group community has always been very comfortable with using an informal target—both before and after housing costs. Dropping the after housing costs measurement is a significant change. Indeed, I think the researchers in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation or wherever would say that that was so. There is a real risk of the Government being accused of running away from the awkward, inconvenient truth that a million extra people will be caught by the after housing costs amendment. For my money, it is important that the Government should be brave and say, "Yes, we are prepared to take the bad news with the good news", and take both halves of this important equation on board in their targets. I am now absolutely persuaded that these targets are right, and I now want this Bill because it is useful, but it will be worth less as a Bill if we lose the after housing costs. I genuinely feel that very strongly. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, always makes very incisive contributions to these debates, and I value her judgment. This is strange coming from me—I said this in Committee—because I come from south-east Scotland, which is even more rural than the noble Baroness’s home patch, but I think that London will be a core part of the debate over the next 10 years. You cannot get away from that. I live in a village with no public transport of any kind; the nearest public transport is seven miles away. Transport is important in its own way and has to be addressed, but it does not come into the same category as the use or disuse—the desuetude, really—of the whole after housing costs argument, which has been such an important part of the way in which this whole subject has been considered over the past 15 to 20 years, to my certain knowledge. This is not a technical amendment. This is an important amendment that will be an earnest of the Government’s good faith in tackling these technical problems properly in the 10 years to come.