Child Poverty Bill

It was the German constitutional court. The noble Lord will know that both benefits and taxes within the EU are ring-fenced and are therefore not available because, clearly, there would be huge implications for eastern Europe and everywhere else where benefit levels and so on are extremely low. What Germany is doing may be appropriate for Germany; I suspect it would have no implications at all for the rest of the EU unless individual member states choose to follow the same path, because benefits, as with taxes, are excluded from EU purview for obvious reasons. I want to ask my noble friend a couple of questions, first, on Amendment 11. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, is correct to say that the diet of many young girls may be inadequate; they may only discover that they are pregnant quite late; and this may affect low birth weight. Traditionally, very low birth weight, below five pounds, has been associated with feeding and respiratory difficulties, vulnerability to summer diarrhoea, and so on. In Committee, I suggested to my noble friend, and I had some support for this, that it would be useful to look at the possibility of breaking the Sure Start maternity grant, which I believe is about £600 now, into stages to assist with prenatal care to ensure that, with help and guidance, it was diverted into good nutrition. Has my noble friend been able to do any further work on that? It seems to me that it is a nil cost budget item that could have useful implications for the dietary standards of those young women who realise, perhaps partway through their pregnancy, that they are indeed pregnant and that their diet so far has not helped ensure that they will have a normal weight child. The second point is on the school dinners amendment, which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, would have spoken to had she been here. Again, I perfectly understand that this is a high budget item as far as my noble friend is concerned, and that the Government have made it clear that they will not go down the path of that amendment. However, in Committee, we sought to press my noble friend on the point that there are some lone parents who, as a result of the Government’s own changes in the Welfare Reform Bill, will now find themselves entering the labour market not when their youngest child is 16, but when their youngest child is seven, and they may be doing work preparation even before that, from when their youngest child is three. Particularly when their youngest child is seven, that lone parent may have two of her three children, say, above the age of primary school and in secondary school. My experience when working with lone parents in the past was that the single biggest tipping factor for lone parents trying to calculate the best-buy package of going into work or not was when they had two or probably three or more children, and some of those children were of secondary school age. The cost of school dinners, at £10 per child, could be £30 a week or £40 a week for four children, was the tipping factor. Even though my right honourable friend the Secretary of State said in the other place that anybody going in to the labour market would be at least £40 a week better off in work, that can be completely wiped out by the cost of school dinners. Therefore there need be no actual gain, particularly for a large family. My noble friend and the department ought to be congratulated on the strides that they are making regarding children in primary school. It is right to focus there because that is where most child development will occur. It is also the place where younger children can be encouraged strenuously into taking nourishing school dinners rather than relying on the chip shop’s chips and fizz for their lunches in a way that older secondary school children may not be. Nonetheless, there will be a cohort of lone parents coming into the labour market for the first time who will be exposing their children to this situation where they have not had the advantage and will not get the advantage of free school dinners for their older children. I wonder if my noble friend can help me on that cohort for at least the first year or two, so that we can ensure that the transition into the labour market is not at the cost of the financial well-being of some of the older children because that parent is having to pay a school dinner bill that she has never before had to address; and going into work will make her worse off. I would be grateful if my noble friend could help me on those two points—the Sure Start maternity grant, and the situation of lone parents coming in to the labour market for the first time because of our changes, the Government’s changes, this House’s changes, which we all support but which nonetheless may prove a tipping point to the lone parent’s calculation of her financial advantage or otherwise of going back into the labour market, a move that we all otherwise want to support her on.