Child Poverty Bill

I support the amendment. I am thinking of families where there is substance misuse. An agency called, I think, the substance misuse advisory group identified a large number of children growing up in such families. I am not suggesting that those families should be particularly targeted, but if at the birth of the child one were to offer the parents either a generous package of clothing, footwear and general requisites for an infant during the first 12 months of life or a sum of money worth a lot less than the package, perhaps some of the families would choose the package. One might find that the infants were better clothed, with the right footwear and sufficient changes of nappy, which they might not have had if the measure being proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, was not in place because we had inadvertently prejudiced ourselves against in-kind benefits.