My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 4, to which I have put my name and which I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for leading on, and to Amendment 7, to which my right reverend friend the Bishop of London has added her name. She sends her apologies that she cannot be present today.
I draw attention, as has been done already, to the latest research on the number of children living in poverty in the UK. I highlight particularly that in 2021-22 in my part of England, the north-east, more than one in three children were living below the poverty line. The number of children living in poverty in the region has seen an increase of 26% since 2014-15—the steepest rise of anywhere in the country during this period.
I too thank the Minister for the very helpful meeting we held last week. I look forward to hearing what specific commitments she might make, especially around including child poverty in the annual metrics through which the impact of the Bill will be measured, and I welcome the recognition that these metrics will bring clarity to the issue of child poverty in the UK. Nevertheless, it is vital that reducing child poverty becomes part of the solution to achieve levelling up and is not seen solely as a by-product of it. I believe it is the primary purpose that should lie behind levelling up.
How can we expect levelling up to be achieved when the number of children growing up in poverty remains so high? How can we expect opportunities to be spread equally across the country when the most deprived areas are experiencing the largest increases in child poverty, resulting in lower educational outcomes and poorer physical and mental health? The experience of poverty in childhood holds back far too many people, preventing them reaching their potential. If we do not make ending child poverty a priority, levelling up will similarly be held back. Put simply, this needs to be a foundational mission for the whole levelling-up agenda.
I turn to Amendment 7. We are all in consensus that good health is key to our flourishing and that we would like to see health inequalities narrowed. However, the health disparities White Paper was scrapped in recent memory and, while the new NHS Long Term Workforce Plan has much to commend it, it demonstrates the lack of a plan to tackle health inequalities. Meanwhile, the healthy life expectancy gap remains and disparities within regions are sometimes even starker than between them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has explained.
The NHS was born in order to work for equitable health. I hope this amendment will ensure that that remains the case. It would ensure that a specific mission relating to health disparities is introduced, including health outcomes towards the end of life; inequalities do not vanish when a person is at the end of their life but persist in access to palliative care. The amendment is necessary because, although we are grateful for the Minister’s assurances, there is still nothing in the Bill that holds the Government to the missions set out in the White Paper, which are the substance of our work to level up. Health is vital to levelling up. It is my conviction that Amendments 4 and 7 go hand in hand and that both need to be in the Bill.