Child Poverty Bill

I shall speak also to Amendment 23, which has the valuable support of colleagues on all sides of the House. The provenance of the amendment stems from the important discussions we had in Grand Committee. We are talking about the important subject of child poverty, and the general public appreciate clearly the direct connection between child poverty and malnutrition. Malnutrition is a subject that I have come to quite recently. It was the noble Lord, Lord Rea, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and reflecting upon their very powerful speeches in Committee that made me go away and look again at its significance and the direct relationship between malnutrition and child poverty. It is that that promoted the idea that it worth spending a moment or two on Report on the issue. I do not want to make a long speech, but I now believe, with all the passion I can muster, that babies that are underweight at birth are, by definition, disadvantaged. All the statistics show that they are immediately part of a group that is, almost inevitably, heading for disadvantage in later life. That is an essential part of the intergenerational poverty that the Bill seeks to address. If we do not think carefully about what can be done in the Bill, against that background, we will be missing an opportunity. I am struck by the recent improvements in nutritional science, which is getting very much better at diagnosing and suggesting remedies and methods of dealing with malnutrition, and the developments that are now available. There is a very clear relationship and link—even as a layperson, I can see it—between diet and underdevelopment; underdevelopment not just in terms of health, but in terms of socio-economic background, well-being in the broadest sense, education and a whole range of other factors. Children learn to be poor by the time they are three or four years of age and therefore, if that is true and if we can determine—as we can very easily—that children who are born underweight are subject and susceptible to being in that position, we are derelict in our duty if we do not do something about that. My Amendment 11 is easier for the Government to accept than Amendment 23, which also stands in my name. Since the Minister was very generous in accepting a Conservative amendment earlier, I think it is only fair that, in the course of an eight-hour debate, he is equal handed. This may be his moment. Turning briefly to Amendment 23—although I am dealing with these amendments briefly, I mean them most sincerely—minimum income standards are something I am much more familiar with and have been arguing for over many years and in earlier incarnations. Minimum income standards are not targets—we had a very good discussion about this in Committee—nobody is suggesting that. Minimum income standards are used by many sister European countries to great effect as a tool, in real time, to calculate and demonstrate to ordinary men and women in the street the differences between what people have to live on and what they should be living on. All this technical stuff that we are fond of discussing here is very important and the Bill is important—I have already conceded that I now accept that—but minimum income standards characterise and demonstrate to people, in a much clearer way, exactly how the level of disadvantage is actually biting on low-income families in the United Kingdom. Frankly, I think it is a disgrace that 1.7 million children are in this situation in 2010. Minimum income standards are a valuable and useful tool to demonstrate the extent of the disadvantage and they are much more accessible in the course of the public debate that we need to engage in to persuade people that this work is essential if we are not to deprive people of life choices and circumstances in the future. It is against that background that I am moving Amendment 11. I think that the amendment is worth testing the opinion of the House on. I would be very interested to know who would be opposed—against the background of the Bill and the explanation that I have given—to the idea that people would be better able to understand the force of the argument if it is conducted with the information about malnutrition that would be available if we had an annual report, as Amendment 11 proposes. I have a dual purpose here: obviously, I will listen to what colleagues have to say about this, and I hope that the amendment finds favour, but I would like to find out, just as a matter of interest, whether this is something that colleagues in the House think is important. The only way of doing that is to test the opinion of the House, but I look forward to what colleagues and the Minister have to say. I beg to move.