Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I do not want to try to follow that. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has got a lot off her chest there, and I agree with most of it. I cling to where we can find common ground with the noble Lord—we discussed this at some length in Committee. He is not alone in understanding the importance of allowing people to trade their own way out of poverty, whether child poverty or any other kind. No one any more is saying that this is all about financial transfers. The noble Lord is on to something here. He is trying to harness the power of government to get people into a better place. That is the way the debate is moving. I was at a breakfast this morning staged by Tomorrow's People. The organisation is working with families and households in a welfare-to-work context. The project will pay dividends and repay careful study. The development of policies, alongside the Bill as well as within it, is going in that direction. The noble Lord is not alone in pursuing what he is trying to achieve in the amendment. However, the list is the problem, because it is incomplete. The noble Lord said that he was willing to talk about what is not in the amendment that should be. I would certainly be willing to talk to him about that. I agree that worklessness and lacking level 2 key skills are both no-brainers. We want to work on that. However, there are worries. If the noble Lord thinks that paragraphs (a) and (c) of the proposed new clause are uncontentious, he is wrong. That is not to say that we are not willing to discuss with him how he gets to where he wants to go. But how do we do this? How do Her Majesty’s Government create stability in marriage? What lever does the Secretary of State pull in order to achieve that? In Committee, we discussed domestic violence and a raft of other things that you would want in any such list if it were to be comprehensive. Therefore, this is not the place for the amendment. I encourage the noble Lord to continue to think through what can be done. There is scope for reaching agreement on some of these issues in order, as he says, to shift the focus to embrace a more holistic and biopsychosocial model of assisting low-income households to get into a better position to deal with poverty over the next 20 years, and thereby indirectly to bear down on child poverty. This territory is worth revisiting, but I do not support the amendment.