My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friends on this important amendment, which has been moved so ably. The Government have still not explained why they did not include the impact on child poverty in the impact assessment for the Bill, as they promised. A Written Answer in the Commons as late as 30 January wrongly stated that the impact assessment sets out the estimated child and adult poverty effects, but it does not. As it is, the shameful figures had to be dragged out of the Government by a Written Question, as my noble friend said. Nor have the Government explained to the Committee how the anticipated increase in the number of children living in poverty thereby revealed is compatible with their obligations under the Child Poverty Act 2010, to which my noble friend referred. I asked this question during Second Reading, but answer came there none.
Instead, the Minister deflected the question with the Government’s usual line that the child poverty measurement indicators are somehow not fit for purpose —picking up on the point made by the noble Lord,
Lord Kirkwood. That was followed by a brief discussion about the importance of education, debt and paid work in tackling poverty, but nothing was said about how by enacting this legislation and knowingly adding 200,000 children to the poverty rolls, the Government are fulfilling their obligations under the Act. Those obligations are in addition to the increase in child poverty estimated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to which my noble friend referred. I would be grateful if today the Minister could answer the question I asked at Second Reading. What does this mean for the Government’s statutory obligations under the Act? Whatever the Government think about the measures of poverty enshrined in the Act, unless they plan to amend it—perhaps the Minister could tell us if they do—they must face up to their legal obligations as set out in it. What countervailing measures will they take against the increase of 200,000 children living in poverty?
I agree with the Minister that education, debt and work are important factors in any anti-poverty strategy, but it is unclear how reducing real incomes will help with any of them. How, for instance, will making life harder for low-income families enhance the educational chances of their children? Hungry children do not make good learners. Anxious and stressed parents are less able to support their children’s education. Adequate incomes are important to educational chances. Paul Gregg has estimated that around 50% of educational inequalities or attainment gaps between the rich and the poor in the UK stem from differences in income. Similarly, as the Minister said, debt is a major problem for poor families, but I fail to see how reducing their weekly income will reduce that problem. All the children’s charities are predicting an increase in debt as a consequence of this Bill, and a Bill that depresses the incomes of low-income workers is hardly conducive to promoting work as the best route out of poverty. I made the point earlier about what Alan Marsh said: people who are demoralised do not make very effective jobseekers.
As the Government consistently attempt to deflect questions about the impact of the Bill on child poverty by dismissing the measures in the Child Poverty Act 2010 as inadequate I should like to say a few words, if the Committee will indulge me, about their recent consultation on those measures. Noble Lords might have read a letter recently in the Guardian from eight fellows of the British Academy, myself included. The letter argued that the Government’s proposals to measure child poverty in a new way,
“are confused and would meet neither the government’s objectives nor international standards”.
While accepting that,
“it is helpful to track what is happening to the factors that lead to poverty and the barriers to children’s life chances”,
the letter advises that,
“it does not make sense to combine all of these into a single measure. To do so would open up the government to the accusation that it aims to dilute the importance of income in monitoring the extent of ‘poverty’ at precisely the time that its policies will be reducing the real incomes of poor families”.
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I should make clear that I did not draft that letter; nor, I must admit, did I respond to the consultation as, having read the document, I could not face the work
involved in engaging with what Jonathan Bradshaw, one of the signatories, called the worst paper setting down government policy direction that he had ever read—and he has been around for quite some time. However, I am grateful to my fellow academics who did engage with it. I had to smile when I read that the DWP had dismissed our letter as coming from “a handful of academics”, not least because of course “handful” has two meanings and I am quite glad to be a handful in terms of how the department sees us. I was grateful to fellow academics who then wrote to the Guardian to make clear that the views expressed in the letter are representative. In one of those letters, Professor Adrian Sinfield argued that responses to the consultation should,
“be made publicly available so the government’s own summary of the views can be subject to scrutiny”.
Will the Minister give that assurance?
I have read some of those responses and want to pick out a few key points from a couple of them, to reassure noble Lords that it is valid to continue to use the indicators from the Child Poverty Act 2010, as set out in this amendment, as measures to assess the impact of this Bill on child poverty.
First, the widely respected Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE expresses its belief that,
“the current suite of indicators in the Child Poverty Act does a good job of measuring child poverty as it is widely understood—as income poverty and material deprivation. These indicators play a vital role in holding government to account in progress on reducing income poverty, within a UK and international context”.
It endorses the relative income measure as,
“the most appropriate headline income poverty indicator, capturing the nature of poverty in contemporary society and allowing for meaningful comparison over time and across countries”.
Although it acknowledges—I am sure the Minister will make this point—that this measure,
“can give counter-intuitive results in certain circumstances”,
for instance, as recently, if median income falls, it points out that that is,
“why monitoring the full suite of indicators in the Child Poverty Act is important”,
a point made very strongly by my noble friend Lady Sherlock. It argues that, in contrast,
“the proposed multidimensional indicator put forward in the consultation document is conceptually muddled and would add confusion rather than clarity to current measurement approaches”.
Secondly, the Royal Statistical Society—not one of the handful that writes letters to the Guardian—argues that combining the indicators as proposed in the consultation could conflate,
“causes, symptoms, things associated with poverty, and things which do not seem to be related to poverty in any major way”.
It warns that public trust in statistics could thereby be threatened.
Given that leading poverty researchers and statisticians are endorsing the indicators enshrined in the Child Poverty Act and reproduced in this amendment, the Government should think very hard before changing the measure of child poverty. That is not to say that there is not scope for complementing it with indicators of risk factors and consequences, which is what many of the indicators suggested in the consultation are and which the previous Government published. I hope
that in responding the Minister will not take refuge in a measurement consultation, which would appear to have received a pretty resounding thumbs-down, but will address the substantive question of the impact of this nasty Bill on the numbers of children living in poverty and the implications of that for their obligations under the Child Poverty Act 2010.