Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, in Grand Committee, the debate on this amendment narrowed to the specific issue of whether the Bill was the appropriate place to put in protections to other poor people. The Minister argued that he could not see, ""how you could possibly, in drawing up a strategy, have regard to, within that strategy, all the consequences that the allocation of resources to meet those targets would have elsewhere in government"."—[Official Report, 27/1/10; col. GC 388.]" That, in a nutshell, is the difference between the Government and us on the amendment. A Bill aiming to achieve a particular end should ensure that it does not create obvious damage elsewhere. Furthermore, the protections should be contained in the Bill that could do the damage. Although it is not an exact precedent, I think it is instructive to look at a similar situation in the Equality Bill. Clause 148 mentions treating some persons more favourably than others—an analogous situation to the Bill in its objective to help households with children. It then includes a protection against conduct otherwise prohibited in this Act—effectively a protection for unfavoured groups. That is exactly what I am aiming to do here and why the Bill is the appropriate place for the protection. Let me summarise why this is an important issue. A statutory target will create pressure to divert resources in a particular direction: households with children. Indeed, that is the specific intention. Clearly the Government can hardly be concerned if those resources are raised out of the economy as a whole. It should, however, be concerned if those resources are derived by reducing resources available to other poor people. The figures suggest that that is exactly what has been happening as a result of the child poverty target. I remind noble Lords of the figures from the House of Commons Library that I cited in Grand Committee. In 2007-08, the minimum support for a childless couple was 32 per cent below the poverty definition used in the Bill—60 per cent of the median income line. That compares with a figure of only 4 per cent for households of a lone parent with one child. That has happened because, over the years, income support for children has risen much more rapidly than benefit levels for adults. That is a particularly dangerous trend because single adults and childless couples become parents, and the effects of previous poverty will tend to have pernicious, long-run effects on their children. Indeed, there is an immediate issue, which we have debated, of the deleterious effect of poor maternal nutrition on newly pregnant females who will be subsisting on income 22 per cent below the poverty line if they are reliant on benefit and it will be their first child. I remind noble Lords of the conclusion drawn about the problem by the Rowntree report, in its publication, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2009. It stated: ""The argument for the much bigger rises in child benefits acknowledges no external point of reference other than the need to progress towards the child poverty goal as ‘cheaply’ as possible. Given the historically unprecedented differential between child and adult benefits that now prevails, this is just no longer enough. Instead, we have to look at the system of social security benefits in the round and decide how their values should stand in relation to one another"." I beg to move.