My Lords, I had not intended to take part in this debate but it seems to me, listening to the noble Baroness who has just sat down, who spoke with her usual eloquence, that she has given only one-half of the story. Government is a matter of making difficult choices. There are always good points on both sides, so it is right that another point of view should be expressed. I speak, incidentally, as the father of a very large number of children.
The late Dick Crossman was a friend of mine; he was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, as I think it was called then, in the 1960s. He told me how surprised he was when he discovered that the family allowance, which was the precursor of child benefit, was unpopular. Whenever he increased family allowance he expected it to be very popular, but it was not. He set out to discover why. The reason why it was unpopular, so he told me, was that the great majority of people in this country felt it was unfair to those parents who had decided to limit the number of their children—having children is an expensive business, what with clothing them and looking after them and so on—that improvident large families were getting all this family allowance. That sense of fairness is very acute among the people of this country, and that has to be weighed in the balance on the other side of the totally one-sided evidence that the noble Baroness presented.
5.15 pm