My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply and my noble friend Lady Hollis for her telling interventions. I cannot help noticing that the Minister did not answer one of my two main charges. She began to answer the first charge, where I had listed a whole series of benefits and payments—specifically for mothers of children—that had been cut. I was grateful to her for at least recognising that offering up in her defence a benefit that the Government have decided to withdraw for second or subsequent children was at least slightly less effective than it might otherwise have been.
I am more concerned that she simply has not addressed my second charge at all. One reason that I put this amendment down was because of the words from the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he introduced the Autumn Statement, explaining specifically why this Bill was needed. I read them out at Second Reading but to remind noble Lords, he said that the Bill mattered because,
“we have to have a welfare system that is fair to the working people who pay for it”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/12/2012; col. 877.]
According to the Guardian, he told the “Today” programme:
“It is unfair that people listening to this programme going out to work see the neighbour next door with their blinds down because they are on benefits”.
It is clear that the Bill was intended to penalise those out of work to be fair to working people. Why, then, is there included in the scope of the Bill a benefit that is payable only to women who have given up work to have a child or look after a child? The Government do not have an answer to that. I suspect that the noble Baroness would not have expressed it in those terms and therefore is not in a position to defend it.
Finally, in relation to the charge being thrown back at us, I was trying to avoid rehearsing the whole Second Reading, but we have made it very clear that
we simply would not have made the choices that the Government have made. We would not have set out to give a tax cut to people earning £150,000 a year or more, which will be worth £100,000 to those who earn more than £1 million a year in order to be able to ensure that they benefited, and to cut benefits to the poorest families to do that. I fully accept and understand that she takes a different view. However, it is not reasonable to say that we have not explained where the money would come from. We have clearly made our case; these are not the choices that we would have made. I very much hope the Government will think again, specifically in relation to statutory maternity pay. In the light of those comments, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.