Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may ask my noble friend one or two questions. Like everyone else, I am particularly pleased to see Amendment 45, although I am not sure that it is necessary, as the terminology already covers it. In practice, however, too many bodies and organisations misunderstand the term "parent", taking it to mean biological parent, so that other groups get excluded. The recurring problem in dealing with this is getting the stats. We wander between figures of 200,000 and 300,000. We really do not know how many people, for how long, with what number of children and at what cost are caring for these children. Could I push my noble friend a step further, given that the commission will now have a wider concept of parenthood? This is probably too late now for the census, but it may not be too late for the Family Expenditure Survey or the General Household Survey. Could my noble friend use his best endeavours to assess the number of people who are producing kinship care, grandparent care, family care or indeed the extraordinary example of care provided by the godparent mentioned by the noble and learned Baroness? This will mean that we know where we stand in policy terms. One of the first things that we could do is to make sure that the commission, in going through its research, includes this group specifically in order to find out the numbers. Without the numbers, there is very little that we can do in policy development.