I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: new clause 2—The reduction in the causes of poverty targets—

‘The Secretary of State shall make regulations setting out reduction in the causes of poverty targets.’.

New clause 3—2010 Target—

‘(1) The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of three months beginning with the day on which the Act is passed, publish and lay before Parliament a report setting out an assessment of progress made towards meeting the 2010 target.

(2) The 2010 target is that in the financial year beginning with 1 April 2010, fewer than 1.7 million children live in households that fall within the relevant income group as defined by section 2(2).’.

Amendment 1, in clause 1, page 1, line 7, at end insert—

‘(b) the relative low income after housing costs target in section [The relative low income after housing costs target],’.

Amendment 23, page 1, line 10, at end insert—

‘(e) the reductions in the causes of poverty targets contained in regulations made by the Secretary of State under section [The reduction in the causes of poverty targets].’.

Amendment 33, in clause 6, page 3, line 9, at end insert—

‘(ba) the circumstances in which a child living in communal accommodation may be regarded as living in a qualifying household;’.

Amendment 2, page 3, line 15, after ‘costs’, insert

‘except when calculating household income for the purposes of section [The relative low income after housing costs target] (the relative low income after housing costs target)’.

Amendment 3, page 3, line 20, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 34, page 3, line 22, at end insert—

‘(4A) Before making regulations under subsections 1(a) and 1(ba), the Secretary of State must request the advice of the Commission as to what statistical surveys can reasonably be expected to be undertaken.’.

Amendment 4, in clause 8, page 4, line 30, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 24, page 4, line 34, at end insert—

‘(iii) describe the progress that the Secretary of State considers needs to be made in dealing with the causes of poverty in order to meet the targets in sections 2 to 5.’.

Amendment 5, page 4, line 43, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 6, in clause 9, page 5, line 14, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 7, in clause 10, page 6, line 3, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 8, page 6, line 15, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 9, page 6, line 25, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 10, in clause 11, page 7, line 13, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 11, page 7, line 26, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 12, page 7, line 37, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 13, in clause 13, page 8, line 29, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 14, in clause 14, page 9, line 14, at end insert—

‘(b) the percentage of children living in qualifying households in the United Kingdom in the target year who were living in households that fell within the relevant income group for the purposes of section [The relative low income after housing costs target] (Relative low income after housing costs target);’.

Amendment 15, page 9, line 32, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 16, page 9, line 34, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 17, in clause 16, page 10, line 12, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 18, in clause 24, page 14, line 38, after ‘or’, insert

‘section [The relative low income after housing costs target] (Relative low income after housing costs target) or’.

Amendment 19, in schedule 2, page 20, line 9, after ‘5’, insert

‘and section [The relative low income after housing costs target]’.

Amendment 20, page 21, line 23, at end insert—

‘(b) the percentage of children living in qualifying households in the United Kingdom in the renewed target year who were living in households that fell within the relevant income group for the purposes of section [The relative low income after housing costs target] (Relative low income after housing costs target);’.

A wry smile crosses our faces when it is announced that this Bill is the main business of the day, but in fact it is, in the sense that child poverty is a crucial issue. That view is certainly shared by all those who served on the Committee that considered the Bill.

New clause 1 arises from the discussions that we had in Committee about the most appropriate method of measuring poverty. Hon. Members will know that there are in the Bill four measures or targets relating to poverty, which combine various facets of income, material deprivation, persistence of poverty, and relative and absolute poverty. Clearly, it is welcome that the Bill does not settle on a single definition but recognises that poverty is multi-faceted and that one statistic does not do justice to the whole problem.

In Committee, we discussed the most appropriate treatment of housing costs. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) and I proposed that, for the purpose of income measures, we should measure income after the deduction of housing costs. One of the arguments that the Treasury Minister who responded to our proposal made against it was that replacing the before-housing-costs measure would cause a problem, because we would not have comparable statistics for use in international comparisons. In other words, if we got rid of the before-housing-costs measure and imposed an after-housing-costs measure, our statistics would not line up with those from other EU countries and the OECD.

The point of debates in Committee is to reflect on such issues and then to come back on Report with revised amendments, and that is what we have done in this case. Rather than suggest that we replace the before-housing-costs measure with an after-housing-costs measure, we now suggest in new clause 1 that we do not replace the four existing targets but add a fifth—income after housing costs. That definition will be familiar to the House. It relates to information that is published regularly in the “Households Below Average Income” statistics, so it requires no additional statistical work. The figures are already there, but they would be given the same force as the other four targets in the Bill.

I should say in passing that amendments 1 to 20 are consequential to the inclusion of new clause 1, so wherever the Bill lists the four targets, there would be a list of five. The wording of new clause 1 exactly mirrors the target relating to the before-housing-costs measure and would simply insert “after housing costs”. Another, slightly more involved, consequential change is that where the Bill says that certain things cannot be deducted, one of which is housing costs, it would have to state that that does not apply to the provisions of the new clause, under which housing costs would be deducted.

I strongly support the new clause and my hon. Friend’s arguments for it. Does he agree that the proposal is particularly salient in low-income areas such as my constituency, because many of my constituents cannot afford the basics after they have paid rent, for the simple reason that rents have not come down with the recession, whereas in many cases incomes have declined?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that very important point. The Bill measures income, including housing benefits and so forth, but takes no account of the impact of housing costs coming out of that income. Many households are in poverty, and if one compares the statistics on income before housing costs and after housing costs, the poverty rate is much higher on the after-housing-costs measure. It is interesting that he should raise that question, because the general assumption is that taking account of housing costs is an urban issue that relates to big cities with high housing costs, but it is clearly relevant in areas such as his, where housing costs can also take a big part of people’s incomes.

Housing costs are a big part of household budgets, and people often have quite limited choices in that regard. It could be argued, “Well, if you have big housing costs it’s because you live in a big house. You have chosen a higher living standard, so why should we deduct your housing costs? That would be like deducting your caviar expenditure. You’ve chosen to spend more and you’re better off as a result, so we shouldn’t deduct it.” However, the reality, particularly for many people in rural areas or others with low means, is that housing is not one of those things that they shop around for, like wondering what tin of beans to buy this week. People in poverty often have very constrained choices about housing, so the level of housing expenditure is not discretionary in the way that spending on a luxury item would be. It really is a necessity, and people have very constrained choices and have to live with the consequences of making them. Assessing income after housing costs have been met would give us another facet. I am not suggesting that it is the only way of looking at things, but it is an additional way.

The second reason why this is important is that the regional impact of housing costs varies considerably, and if we look only at income before housing costs, we do not capture that. Obviously, on average, housing costs will be substantially higher in London and certain other housing hotspot areas. One of the perverse aspects of the measure of income before housing costs is that it includes housing benefit. If that is the only measure we have, we end up with the strange situation where somebody with a huge rent that is being met wholly or largely by housing benefit seems to be relatively well off because all that housing benefit is included in their income, but no account is taken of the fact that it has an equal and opposite cost on the other side of the equation. That bit would never get measured under the Bill as it stands.

Let us take as an example two pensioner households living next door to each other, both with identical pension income. One person has paid off their mortgage and owns their house outright, and the other is on housing benefit and getting their rent paid in full. On the before-housing-costs measure, the person with the housing benefit is much better off than their neighbour because they have housing benefit, but after housing costs they are both in the same position because they just have their pension once they have met their housing costs. Clearly, the measure we propose provides a fairer assessment of relative living standards than saying that the person on housing benefit is better off. Indeed, one could argue that the person who owns their house outright is better off, because they have an asset, from which one might impute an income. The before-housing-costs measure puts people the wrong way round in that sense, so it is not an ideal definition.

I mentioned in response to the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) that poverty is greater after housing costs than before them. That is not a reason to put it in the figures, but it demonstrates that, once income including housing benefit is measured, housing costs are seen to take up a bigger proportion of the incomes of the poor than of the rich, which is an important facet of measuring people’s poverty.

We want reliable measures over time. My hon. Friend mentioned the problem of rent inflation. It has been the policy of successive Governments to deregulate social rents, so they have risen far faster than inflation for many years. If we only use the before-housing-costs measure, that makes people appear better off, because their housing benefit shoots up every time their rent does. That seems perverse in the extreme. If we measure income after housing costs, we will strip out the effect of rental inflation, which, as he said, has been very significant. There are strong reasons for having the additional target—it would give us a new lens through which to view child poverty without taking away from any of the existing measures, and it would catch an important facet of poverty.

As I said, I have thought about the responses that Ministers might give. One might be, “Well, we can’t add another target to the Bill. We’ve got four targets, we can’t have five.” If they were to say, “We’ve got four targets, we can’t have 99,” I would probably accept that, but we wish to add one additional target. Why do the Government have four, and not three or two? Each target needs to stand on its own feet as an important indicator of poverty and give us new insights that we would not get without it. That should be the test of each target in Bill. As I said in Committee, I believe that the absolute low income target could go. If we could have only four, I would take that one out, but there seems no substantive reason why five good targets that provide a more comprehensive measure of poverty are worse than four. It is a difference not of kind but of degree, and given the added value of the after-housing-costs measures, the additional target is justified.

When we discussed the matter in Committee, Ministers said, “Ah, yes, but housing is in the Bill. You don’t need to worry, it is already covered.” I apologise if I am running through the Minister’s bullet points for her. The Bill does contain provisions on housing, such as the material deprivation measure, which contains a few questions about housing, but nothing that will capture the cost of housing as a measure of income after housing costs would. The difference between the poverty figures before and after housing costs is, as it says on the tin, all to do with housing costs. They should not be buried as a sub-factor in part of a measure. That is the problem. Although the material deprivation measure has a few housing-related matters in it, there are also a lot of non-housing matters. It would be incredibly difficult to strip out details of housing costs and be clear about whether they, rather than some other facet of material deprivation, were driving the figures. It will be as plain as a pikestaff that housing costs are causing the problem if we use figures for income after rather than before them.

The Minister might say that housing costs are about housing quality. I hope that I addressed that point earlier. The two are not wholly uncorrelated, but they are not very well correlated. Higher housing costs are often the product of necessity and of the part of the country in which people live. Often, as many people who live in private rented accommodation would say, they are not a good proxy for the quality of housing. Deducting housing costs and having both before and after-housing-costs measures, so that one can assess their impact on the figures, therefore seems to us an entirely sensible approach.

Drawing those threads together, the reason why there is not just one target in the Bill is that child poverty is multi-faced. The Government have alighted on four targets, but they could have alighted on three or five. Once one has accepted that there should be more than one, having five rather than four does not seem to make a substantive difference, and there is huge added value in the after-housing-costs approach.

I shall briefly address other amendments and new clauses in this group. I am sure that the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) will speak to new clause 2, which suggests that there should be

“reductions in the causes of poverty targets.”

I had to read that several times to work out where the pause came—I think it means reductions in the causes of poverty rather than in the targets. Clearly we should examine the causes of poverty, not just the outcomes. We discussed the matter in Committee, in the light of which the hon. Gentleman has obviously refined the new clause. I look forward to hearing him make the case for it. New clause 3 argues for an assessment of progress on the 2010 target. We supported the idea in Committee and anticipate doing so again.

Amendments 33 and 34 were prompted by the discussions of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) may be planning to speak to them. They raise some important points about who counts as a child in a qualifying household and whether there are two tiers of children in the Bill. There are children who appear in the household surveys on which all the statistical data are based, and there are other children who come under the Bill’s more general wording about deprivation but who are not covered by the statistical targets.

I do not mean to be in any way critical of the Joint Committee, but in a sense it is easier to point out the problem than to work out what one should do about it. The Committee referred to Gypsy and Traveller children, some of whom are in the statistics because they live in households picked up in the surveys—for example, if they are on local authority or private Traveller sites. However, the most transient might not get picked up in the figures. It is incredibly difficult to think how one might meld them into the statistics, so although it is important that they are not treated as second-class children, I am not entirely sure how we can add them to a measure based on household equivalent income.

Likewise, we discussed in Committee children who are in care. Their well-being is clearly crucial, but trying to measure the living standard of a child living in an institution, for example, is very difficult. A child being cared for in a private household, perhaps having been fostered, will be picked up in the normal statistical surveys, but it is difficult to identify the living standards of a child living in an institution whose meals are provided, but for whom there is no parental or household income that one can measure. It is difficult to know whether their income is 50 or 70 per cent. of the median, or how they could be melded into a living standard measure based on households. I am sure that my hon. Friend would accept that. The real question is whether there should be another statistical target or whether we should give greater weight to the parts of the Bill that refer more broadly to socio-economic disadvantage. I look forward to hearing his suggestions.

New clause 1 need not divide us along party lines, and I welcome the support that the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) has given it. She was a member of the Public Bill Committee and is much respected on these issues, and she rightly believes that housing is a crucial aspect of living standards. I can understand why she would take that view as a London MP. I hope that all parties will support the new clause. I hope for a conciliatory response from the Minister, because I know that my noble Friends in another place attach great importance to housing costs and they will want to return to the matter if we cannot get a better measure into the Bill—one that would improve it and help the Bill to achieve the goal that we all share of ensuring that child poverty is abolished.

In speaking to this group of amendments, I hope to achieve two objectives. The first is to praise the Government for their determination in setting the objective in the Bill. It is an audacious thing to do, and I do not want the debate to pass without that being said. However, I also wish to raise some questions about the balance of the Government’s approach, not in the Bill but up to this point in their campaign to abolish child poverty. I shall question whether they have been far too mechanical in seeing the solution as coming largely from benefits rather than through trying to balance people’s immediate need for more money with an examination of the long-term causes of poverty. I take new clause 2 to be about that matter.

First, on a point of congratulation, no Government in the post-war period, or indeed ever, have set the objective of abolishing poverty in the way that this Government have. At the time they set that objective, I was Minister with responsibility for welfare reform, but I learned about it from a television broadcast. That suggested something about the relationship between the two powers in Downing street and the rest of the Administration, but I was pleased to read more recently that No. 11 was not even consulted before the objective was set in the famous Toynbee Hall speech by the then Prime Minister.

Order. I am reluctant to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but I am not quite sure how far he is going to stray from new clause 1. I am prepared to allow a certain amount of latitude, but he will bear in mind that we have new clauses and amendments before us.

I thought we were taking all the clauses together, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Yes we are, but a degree of precision is essential.

Of course it is.

One thing Seebohm Rowntree did was list the issues that the Government are trying to deal with in the Bill—in a sense, that underpins new clause 1 and the whole of the Government’s approach. At the turn of the last century, he asked why people were poor. He listed low pay, being a single-parent household, unemployment, sickness and old age, but he went on to say that one should not read such things as the causes of poverty, and that they are in fact manifestations of poverty. He said that if we want to look at the causes of poverty, we have to go much deeper into the big questions about political economy.

Therefore, I much welcome the fact that when the Government started to fan out in the Bill how they view poverty, they got on to what I think we need to get on to—namely, looking at the deep, root causes of poverty in our society, with which amendments in this group deal. Indeed, I would argue that it is inconsistent for the Government to adopt such an approach to defining poverty and not to welcome the debate about the link between children in poverty and one-parent households—Labour Members find it easier to link low pay in such households to children in poverty. There seems to be something inconsistent about our approach. We are not prepared to try to teach the nation that if one becomes a single-parent, or makes little opportunity of the 13 years of state investment in education and goes into an unskilled job, the probability is that one will be poor.

I was therefore disturbed that, when in the past couple of days the Leader of the Opposition raised the question—he did so very carefully—of eliminating the discrimination against two-parent families, it was immediately read by some of the single-parent groups as an attack on the status of single parents. I know they have grounds for doing so, because when we were first elected in ’97, we said we were going to abolish such discrimination, but we foolishly presented that in terms of attacking single parents and reducing their income. However, the proposals I mentioned were not to reduce the income of single-parent households, but to raise the income of households with two parents. In that way, the children in such households would be equivalent to children in households in which only one parent earned.

I rose to congratulate the Government on distinguishing themselves as the first ever who decided they could, by their means, change whether people lived in households in poverty. Secondly, I rose to congratulate the Government on broadening how they see the mechanisms by which poverty is transmitted. They have moved—thank goodness—from a rather crude definition and from concern only in money terms, and are beginning to look at the debate about the root causes of poverty, which I think we need to have in what remains of this Parliament and in the next.

That is why the Government’s proposals for raising the performance of our secondary schools are so important. We need to guarantee that practically every child leaves with minimum school-leaving requirements. Those requirements should not be made up by adding slightly bogus vocational qualifications to five GCSEs including English and maths. In the hard world in which the employer interprets such qualifications, children who have them will probably be condemned to poverty in adulthood, and their children with them.

I also believe that we need to get over to younger people that opting for single parenthood is not a desirable life choice. Many have that inflicted upon them, but the way we allow young people to make that decision without spelling out what it means for them and their life chances, and more importantly for their children’s life chances, fails that next generation. It is not good enough for the pressure groups to wheel out upper-middle class young single parents who are having a whale of a time and saying, “I’m so pleased I’m a young single parent. I can’t tell you all the choices I have now I’ve got all that over with,” and the rest of it. The young women who follow that model in my constituency do not have the bank balances to see them through.

I affirm my congratulations to the Government on their long period of stewardship and on staying with this issue. Perhaps a little later than I would have thought, they have widened the debate beyond what Rowntree thought were the superficial causes to the root causes of poverty, which I welcome.

I put that down as a marker for the next Parliament—hopefully some of us will be returned by the electorate. The Government made their choice at a time of record public expenditure. In the next Parliament, there will be record cuts in public expenditure. As Tawney said, when the great liners go down, who gets into the lifeboats is important. It is important for us to help to shape the debate about the priorities and to decide who gets into those lifeboats when the age of big cuts in public expenditure is really upon us.

As always, it is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and, indeed, the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who ably introduced new clause 1. As the hon. Gentleman said, we touched on this issue in Committee and I understand where he is coming from. Indeed, in Committee I made the point that families are primarily interested in the after housing costs income—how much money they have left to spend on food, clothing, transport and so on, to balance the weekly budget. That is the critical amount for many families.

We do track that figure. In Prime Minister’s questions earlier, the figure of 4 million children living in poverty was mentioned, and that is the after housing cost figure, rather than the before housing cost figure of 2.9 million. In Committee, my hon. Friends and I backed amendment 28, tabled by the hon. Gentleman, which would have removed clause 6(2) which prevents housing costs from being deducted when calculating the net income of a household. We thought that that was overly prescriptive because it would tie the hands of the Child Poverty Commission, which has not even been set up yet, when it came to take a view on housing costs. We were happy to back the hon. Gentleman on that amendment.

As the hon. Gentleman has made clear, the households below average income series already publishes the figures for both before and after housing costs, and it will continue to do so. The Minister made that clear. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we will pay careful attention to the after housing costs figure. At 4 million, it is much higher than any of us would like.

My concern about supporting new clause 1 is that we already have four income targets in the Bill, as I said in Committee. I was grateful for the comments by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead when he talked of the importance of widening the range of indicators and targets that we use to track our progress in reducing poverty, which will of course always be measured in income terms. We should have a range of targets in the Bill that drive policy in the right direction. My concern about new clause 1 is that that fifth income target would focus more on downstream intervention, whereas the real need is to focus on the root causes of poverty—those factors that trap people in a life of poverty, about which the right hon. Gentleman rightly talked. In that respect, I tabled new clause 2 and amendments 23 and 24.

New clause 2 seeks to add a fifth target to the Bill, just as the hon. Member for Northavon has tried to do, that would deal specifically with reducing the causes of poverty. I tabled a similar amendment in Committee and made an attempt to put some detail in the clause. Other members of the Committee said, “Well, you have included this, but you have left out that, and we do not think that that’s very good.” I took that point. I accept that the new clause is relatively brief at the moment, but amendment 23 specifies that the actual causes of poverty would be specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State. That is clearly something that the Child Poverty Commission, among others, would have a view on, and it would advise the Government. I think that that measure is essential. Indeed, my overriding criticism of the Bill is that it focuses purely on downstream income intervention and does not do enough at an early enough stage to address the causes of poverty.

I am supported in that point by several commentators, not least by witnesses at the formal evidence sessions in Committee. For example, both Mike Brewer of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Donald Hirsch, a well respected academic from the university of Loughborough, were asked whether the Bill needs to address the longer-term causes of poverty in the early years, and they both said yes. Mike Brewer said:

“I wish that there were a broader range of indicators”.

That is precisely what new clause 2 is seeking to introduce. Neil O’Brien, another witness from Policy Exchange, spoke about the current set of targets driving public policy to

“relentlessly...downstream intervention to give people income, rather than...tackle the causes.”

He spoke of it being necessary to align

“your targets to your broader strategy”.——[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 101-104, Q199 and 203.]

That is the central point.

I am attracted by my hon. Friend’s approach, but does he think that it would be possible to reach agreement on the causes of poverty? Is not that quite a political issue, on which people from different backgrounds or different sides of the House might have a fundamentally different view, especially on things such as family breakdown? Is it possible to achieve his goal?

I agree with my hon. Friend that it would not be easy, and my attempt to do so in Committee did meet with some flak from fellow Committee members. I thought that it was slightly unfair as I had made an attempt to put a bit of detail in the Bill, but I was so roughly treated that I have tabled a slightly sparser clause on this occasion. However, I do not think that difficulty should prevent us from doing this work. My hon. Friend may be aware of the comments by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that

“the strategy against poverty and social exclusion pursued since the late 1990s is now largely exhausted.”

That is the very group that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead quoted.

We can all agree on a certain set of indicators, perhaps around worklessness, addiction and educational underachievement, and in fact I thought that there was a degree of unity across the House on the issue of family breakdown.

I was trying to get away from this debate. The quotation that the hon. Gentleman cited from Mike Brewer was—apart from the last half-sentence—about a more flowery definition of poverty, whether children are fat or not fat. What I was trying to emphasise was that we should be primarily concerned with how to create as many exits from poverty and, equally importantly, how to cut off the supply routes to poverty. The hon. Gentleman may have had a rough going over in Committee, but that is what I thought his clause was about. What are the supply routes to poverty?

I mentioned one or two routes in response to my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), including worklessness, educational underachievement and addiction. Nearly 1.5 million children in this country live in households where their parents are subject to serious addiction. Just over 1 million are subject to serious alcohol abuse and 350,000 children have parents who are subject to serious drug abuse. I say to the Government in all earnestness that, unless they ally their anti-addiction policy with their anti-poverty strategy, we will not succeed in meeting the 2020 targets.

I thought that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead phrased his contribution extremely well. I am at one with him on ensuring that the debate is not about stigma or castigating a particular group, but about giving help to every type of family and trying to encourage the right sort of behaviour, which he ably described in relation to his constituents.

Is addiction not to some extent a presenting problem? Are we saying that if we abolished addiction, we would automatically link that to the abolition of poverty? What does the hon. Gentleman think are the supply routes? Behind addiction is another tale to tell. There are two big routes that the House should want to tackle. The first is why some people can command only low-paid jobs—if they are going? Secondly, we know that the likelihood is that very young mothers on their own and their children will be poor. Should we not at least be telling people that?

I agree. There is no great difference between the right hon. Gentleman and myself. I think that his first point referred primarily to education and skills and his second to certain types of family formation. I am in broad agreement with him.

Our party is often critical of targets because of how they distort behaviour to meet often statistical and numerical outcomes. Child poverty is a complex issue involving supply routes, causes and the reasons why some people are sustained in poverty. Does my hon. Friend share my fear that because the Government want to fulfil and not breach their targets, such a Bill, which sets fixed numbers based on income, may risk putting a short-term desire for box-ticking ahead of the long-term need to address the deep-rooted causes of poverty and to support those who need long-term solutions, not short-term political fixes?

My hon. Friend served with great distinction in Committee, and it is excellent to see him in the Chamber. He has a point. It worries me a little when I hear Ministers saying, “We have raised 500,000 people”—or however many—“out of poverty.” I take the example of a household that has been nudged from, say, 58 to 61 per cent. of median income. Imagine knocking on the door of that household and asking, “What does it feel like to be out of poverty?” That might be a harsh analogy because I realise that we will always need a target, that it will involve a line and that crossing it will bring only slight differences. However, my general point is that we could visit that household that is just above the poverty threshold and find that things had not really changed. I believe that the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) talked about the culture of poverty in his excellent contributions in Committee, and I think that he has a sense of where I am coming from.

I hope to press new clause 2 to a Division, and the same goes for new clause 3, if time permits—although I realise that it might not. There is a serious point behind new clause 3. It would put the much easier 2010-11 target to halve the original rate of child poverty by 2010-11 on a statutory basis. I was grateful to the hon. Member for Northavon and his colleagues in Committee for supporting us on that. I look forward to their support if we can press new clause 3 to a Division.

As I said, there is a serious point behind the new clause. We are not just playing politics. All the commentators think it unlikely that we will meet the target. In the light of the pre-Budget report, will the Minister tell the House how many additional children will be brought out of child poverty? I am looking at the section in the report on supporting families to reduce child poverty, on page 81, but that number is not leaping out at me. Perhaps she will enlighten the House in her response.

Interestingly, it has been 10 years, virtually to the day, since the then Chancellor of the Exchequer—the current Prime Minister—committed the Government, in the pre-Budget report on 9 November 1999, to the intermediate goal, as I think it was described, of halving child poverty by 2010. We have had 10 years, almost to the day, of trying to meet the 2010 target. New clause 3 would provide great value by ensuring that the relevant Secretary of State—I understand from Committee proceedings that it would be the Chancellor—comes to the Dispatch Box and explains why the 2010 target of halving child poverty has not been achieved, because, frankly, after today it is not going to be achieved, and then, importantly, how the policy will change, what additional things will be done in our schools and skills training, and how we can strengthen families throughout the length and breadth of the nation. That would give us an early opportunity to learn the lessons on how we need to tweak policy to make further progress. That is the point. If we continue with the current rate of progress, with the strategy that the Government have had in place since 1999, we will not have a chance of meeting the 2020 target, which everyone in the House, I believe, wants to see achieved.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; he is a charitable person and does not necessarily share my view. I believe that the Bill is before the House today to distract child poverty campaigners and the people of this country from the fact that the Government made a solemn promise to halve child poverty by 2010, but had no intention or means of meeting that promise. That was in a time of plenty when we were spending far more funds than the country could afford, and they still failed to deliver on that promise. Instead of being honest with people, therefore, they have set out to promise eradication in 10 years, when we know that public finances will be far tougher. The likelihood is that a fraud and a deceit are being put upon people, including the poorest children in the country, by a Government who are seeking to distract people’s attention rather than tackling the root causes of poverty.

My hon. Friend made that type of forceful comment extremely well in Committee. Some believe that that is the case; they think that this is declaratory politics. I would like again to quote Mike Brewer from the IFS. He said:

“Those with a more cynical mind would accuse the Government of introducing this Bill to try to hide its predicted failure to meet its target for child poverty in 2010/11…It is not clear why the Government is unwilling to meet its own target for 2010/11, but keen to bind its successors to more stringent targets.”

That is precisely my hon. Friend’s point. As I have said, therefore, I would like to press new clause 3 to a vote. I know that he will be in the Division Lobby behind me, if we get the opportunity.

It is easy enough for us to attack the Government for not achieving the objective, but will the hon. Gentleman not at least praise them for setting out on this course and for willing huge taxpayer resources to achieve it? If one wants to criticise the Government, it should be for having a top-down approach—for wanting to do things without thinking how the poor themselves might be set free and given the ability to change their own circumstances.

I do indeed pay tribute to the Government’s commitment. I do not think that that is disputed. If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the record, he will see that I said that in Committee and I am happy to say it again from the Dispatch Box. I am interested in his point. He is right to talk about the importance of moving away from a top-down approach, which is why I am excited about the potential of part 2 of the Bill—I do not know if he has had a chance to look at it—which offers an exciting new role for local authorities. My hon. Friends and I share a concern that the Government have taken an overly prescriptive and top-down approach to dealing with local authorities, because we believe that having a degree of diversity and trying different solutions is likely to yield more results.

I will be mercifully brief. I want to raise a number of points in support of new clauses 3 and 2.

As most colleagues will know, I spent quite a lot of time on the international development brief in the 1990s, when we were pursuing the 2015 millennium development goals. They were set in the early 1990s, when giving 10, 15 or 20 years to achieve them seemed a perfectly reasonable and commendable thing to do. Everyone thought that that was exactly the right way forward. As it turned out, the closer we get, the more we realise we are a long way from achieving those goals. With hindsight, it would have been far better to build in more immediate, intermediate goals as we walked along that journey, to ensure that we were moving in the right direction and testing ourselves. That is why I support new clause 3.

We have had the Government target, but new clause 3 talks about not just an immediate target for 2010 in this Bill, but being very specific indeed about what is achieved through that target. I said this on Second Reading, but putting in place a target and setting up a commission are not substitutes for a proper, well thought through and developed strategy for hitting such targets and delivering on the issue that we are all concerned about—there is no one in the House who does not want to reduce child poverty, however it is defined. If we are serious, there is an argument for restructuring the machinery of government, rather than just setting up a commission and setting a target, so that many existing Departments are better placed to bear down on the problem.

I sit on the Select Committee on Home Affairs. Yesterday we heard evidence from the former drugs tsar, Mr. Hellawell. He talked about his time as someone brought in from the outside to take overall responsibility of the drugs strategy in the United Kingdom, and about the difficulty of getting all Departments co-ordinated and in alignment to bear down on the drugs problem. If we genuinely believe that child poverty in this country should be a huge focus for the Government and if we would all like it to be significantly reduced, there is an argument for restructuring the machinery of government to bear down on the problem, and not just setting a target or establishing a commission. I hope that the House will seriously consider agreeing to new clause 3, and if not, to something like it, to ensure that we do not just set waffly old goals, but put down, on the record, achievable targets and stepping stones towards achieving them in the mean time.

New clause 2 talks about the causes of poverty, which resonates greatly with the former Prime Minister’s talk about being “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Of course we would like to be tough on the causes of poverty, but what are they? I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and wondered whether it was possible for us to agree as a House on what the causes of poverty might be. For example, what part do human nature and the choices that we make individually play in the causes of poverty? We have all observed, in our lives and in our constituencies over the years, people in similar circumstances and from similar backgrounds making different choices, with some flourishing and others ending up in deprivation and poverty. To what extent can one factor in those individual choices that are a reflection of individual human nature? Perhaps that is utterly impossible.

Ill health is also a cause of poverty. We have all known families who have been going along very nicely indeed, when the primary breadwinner—or perhaps both parents or a child—sadly becomes ill and the money stops flowing, causing disruption and poverty. Family breakdown, drug addiction and alcohol dependency, which my hon. Friend mentioned, and poor education—all these things can be causes of poverty.

The hon. Gentleman lists a number of issues. We are all committed in this House to getting to the causes, but is there not a danger that, by making the list so wide, that becomes impossible, because everything from the weather onwards becomes a factor?

The hon. Gentleman anticipates me. I embrace that concept, except to say that I am not sure how practical it is. I support probing the issue and I believe that the Government need to think about it more, but I reject the fact that we are measuring only financial poverty. This is a slightly different point, but we know that there are lots of children who are from modest or poor backgrounds but who have a stable, loving family and lots of encouragement and nurturing, and who would not consider themselves to be poor. There are other families with a great deal more financial support and income, but who live in chaotic households and would certainly consider themselves to be deprived of the most important things in life.

We are talking about very difficult issues. More thinking needs to be done. The Bill suffers from the fact that it does not seek to get behind the issue of poverty and try at least to trigger a debate about its causes. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire is on to a good thing in setting out new clause 2, which would require someone to do some more thinking on the issue. I think that the idea is for regulations to come forward to grapple with the problem—I am sure that my hon. Friend will nod at this point.

indicated assent.

That would be a very valuable exercise.

As ever, the hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful and valuable contribution, but does he agree that although poverty, and particularly child poverty, is about more than money, unless we address the financial implications of child poverty, frankly this Bill will be for the birds and we shall make no headway at all?

I agree, or I think I do. I certainly want us to address financial child poverty—of course I do. It is distressing when we come across it, as we all do in our constituencies every weekend. However, I feel even more strongly that I would not want us just to focus on financial poverty, but to see some of the other values and framework principles in life as equally important. Some of us enjoyed them as we were growing up and some of us did not, and they make a huge difference to the sorts of people we become.

There is the possibility of distortion, not only in the child poverty agenda as we get nearer to the targets being met, but across the piece. Does my hon. Friend share my misgivings about such declaratory legislation, which means that child poverty, by being put on a statutory footing, has privilege over every one of the various other priorities that government has to balance at all times, such as the vulnerable elderly? If the legislation has force in the rather poorer decade that we now face, it could lead to the wrong decisions being made from a social justice point of view, in wider areas than child poverty alone.

My hon. Friend is on to a very good point—this is a question of what the Government focus on. This slightly contradicts the point that I made earlier. If we are serious about child poverty, we need to restructure Government Departments and align them so that they can bear down on the problem. My hon. Friend might ask why we should not do that in relation to elderly poverty or to deprivation of all kinds. Of course these are important issues.

I have been in the House for 17 years. I believe that, for all sorts of reasons, the situation is now significantly worse—with the lack of social cohesion, with behaviour issues and the fact that so many children are now growing up in households of chaos—than when I first entered the House in 1992. I do not say that in any political sense. I would love to see whichever Government are in place after the next election focusing on this issue and really getting underneath the surface to try to tackle it.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, in about 1980, about one in three children were growing up in poverty, compared with just under one in five now? By any standard, a society with a third of its children growing up in poverty is much more dysfunctional.

I am afraid that I do not really trust those statistics terribly much. From my own experience, looking out on this country and on my own constituency profile and work load, I believe that our country now faces greater challenges in terms of its social cohesion and the quality of life of the 15 to 20 per cent. of the population who are growing up in households of chaos and not being given a chance.

I am talking about new clause 3, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in case you were under any misapprehension. The corollary of what I said earlier about choices is this: I accept that many people growing up in this country do not have the same choices as those who come from secure, stable, nurturing backgrounds. I totally take that point on board.

I think that I have delivered more or less all that I wanted to say. I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire is on to a good point in new clause 2, and that we should build specific delivery mechanisms into the Bill, as set out in new clause 3. I hope that the Government are in listening mode.

I rise to speak to amendments 33 and 34, tabled on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights by me and the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the Chairman of that Committee.

The Joint Committee attempts—it generally succeeds—to analyse every piece of primary legislation that might engage human rights, and to issue a report for Parliament and the Government in which we make recommendations, particularly when we feel that the legislation has human rights compatibility issues; we also comment when the measures enhance human rights. We tend to do that before the Report stage of a Bill in the first House, to enable Parliament as a whole to consider our recommendations and debate the amendments. It is good to see the amendments being debated, although there is not always time to do so on Report.

The Joint Committee report was published on 10 November 2009. It makes it clear that the Committee welcomes the Bill and generally recognises it as a human rights enhancing measure. We also welcome the detail provided in the human rights memorandum that the Government supplied and the fact that the Government recognised, implicitly and explicitly, the role that the Bill can play in meeting our treaty obligations under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the United Nations convention on economic, social and cultural rights. It is good to have the opportunity to debate measures that show the value of our human rights commitments arising from the treaties and the Human Rights Act 1998, particularly in the light of the many attacks—usually based on myth—that are made on the Act in this House.

The dilemma is that for the vast bulk of the nation’s children, living standards can be assessed using household surveys on a common standard, internationally defined and all the rest of it. Is my hon. Friend’s argument that, if it is not possible to put children in the groups he refers to on to that same metric—that is the key problem; we know where they are and we could survey them, but converting their living standards into the same metric is very difficult—could we not apply a rational approach to the vast majority of children; or would my hon. Friend’s approach preclude us from doing that at all because it is discriminatory?

I do not know the answer to that question, but we recognise that the number of additional children that it would be necessary to survey is relatively small, amounting to about 0.5 per cent. Because the whereabouts of many of those children is already known because of the other responsibilities of public authorities, it would be difficult to make a case for regarding as disproportionate the task of ensuring that the data are available, so that all children can be measured against child poverty targets. I accept my hon. Friend’s point that it would not be easy to apply household data to non-household individuals. I am sensitive to the fact that existing data sets are not conducive to that task, but the amendment does not say that the data sets are conducive. It is designed to get the Government to take extra steps to ensure—perhaps by amending the targets to have two tiers, because although it would be differential, it would not be discriminatory if the intention and effect are good—the best means of identifying, aiding and lifting out of poverty those other children who are just not being measured.

I am listening carefully to what the hon. Gentleman is saying and I believe I understand his point. I just wonder whether we simply need a completely separate target for those children. Might that not be the best way to deal with the problem?

That might be the way forward. We argue that the Bill as a whole, because of the targets set in it, ends up being discriminatory—not intentionally, but in effect—so if the relevant part of the Bill dealt specifically with those children, it would seem to solve the problem. It is not a matter of saying that those children need to appear in every target, but the relevant part of the Bill that puts a duty on the Government to allocate resources to children living in poverty should not by design, albeit unintentionally, exclude some of the most disadvantaged children. That is really the nub of our argument.

The problem is not that, because the children are not covered by the duty, they may not receive the resources. Instead, the problem is that, given our present difficult financial straits, resources may be moved from those children who are not subject to the targets in order to provide the resources to deal with the children who are covered in the target. We have seen that happen, or at least allegedly happen, before—in the treatment of lone parents, for example, when lone parent benefit for the very poorest was cut in order to increase it for the next poorest group. That happened some years ago and I well remember the debate about it. That is the real problem.

Finally, I would like to deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) in his first, less irate, intervention. He made a very good point. I have always had concerns about target-based approaches to policy, because if targets are not measured correctly or if the target ends up being the wrong one, it can distort policy and resource allocation. We see that in the health service all the time, where the most urgent patient is the one who has been waiting 17 and a half weeks, rather than the one who has waited only three weeks but whose case is clinically more urgent. That is why when dealing with the vulnerable, it is vital that we identify the right groups. That is why I hope the Minister will consider carefully the constructive suggestions made by the Joint Committee.

I rise to speak briefly to this group of amendments. I confess that I have not been involved in the debate all along, but would like to raise just a few points.

When it comes to the key principles and objectives of this Bill, I believe the Government’s heart is in the right place, but as right hon. and hon. Members have already said, the target date of 2020 will not be achieved—it is going to be very difficult.

Before I entered this House and became engaged in full-time politics, child poverty to me was a third-world country—a country trying to develop and move on and enter western society. When I came into politics, however, I was astounded at the number of children who were living in poverty across the whole of the United Kingdom. That was a real eye-opener for me.

I find myself in agreement with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who is not in his place at the moment, in much of what he said about poverty. Other Members have raised the point about finding reasons for such poverty. What is the root cause? We have heard a number of different responses to that question.

Ten years ago, the Government pledged to eradicate child poverty within a generation. It had doubled in the preceding 20 years, and the United Kingdom had the worst child poverty record in Europe.

My hon. Friend has talked of the Government’s commitment to eradicating child poverty within a generation. Does he agree that part of the challenge, not just in Northern Ireland but throughout the United Kingdom, is that poverty is a generational problem? In many societies, estates and communities, the grandparents, the parents and, now, the children have all suffered from the same difficulty, from which no one has managed to extricate them.

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. There is no doubt that child poverty is a generational problem, and that it is still a reality in Britain today. Figures have been issued ranging from 4 million to 6 million. However, many of the issues have been devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive. Like my hon. Friend, I had the privilege of chairing the Social Development Committee in the Assembly, where all those issues were raised.

How is a balance to be struck between giving families who are living in poverty a sense of empowerment and a sense that they are the authors of their own lives—I am thinking, for instance, of the many first-generation immigrant families who live in poverty but, driven by their values, make sure that their children do not follow them—and giving them support? We need to support them, but not in a way that sustains a lack of aspiration and a lifestyle that will keep successive generations in poverty. How do we provide support in a way that is both humane and politically effective?

I wish that I had a crystal ball. It is very difficult to identify the root of the problem and find a way of encouraging people to emerge from that lifestyle. The hon. Gentleman referred to addiction earlier, and that is also a major problem. As with a disease, we need to find the root cause in order to eradicate this problem, and I believe that it will take until well after 2020 to complete the job.

The Northern Ireland Executive remain committed to the 2006 strategy document “Lifetime Opportunities”. Its key objectives are enshrined in the “Programme for Government”, which sets out some ambitious targets including the lifting of some 67,000 children out of poverty by next year and—as the Bill proposes—the elimination of child poverty by 2020. That will be very difficult, but the aims and objectives are there.

Money was mentioned earlier today. Let me end with a comment made by a parent from Belfast. She says:

“I know that money cannot buy happiness and my children have loads of love, but having enough money is important to ensure that my children are well looked after and have the things that they need in life.”

We owe it to our children and the next generation to act on that.

As I have said, I believe that the Government’s aims and objectives show that their heart is in the right place, but we need to dig for the root cause in order to deal with the problem.

It is a pleasure both to follow the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) and to participate in this debate. I shall address my remarks chiefly to new clauses 2 and 3. The hon. Gentleman and other contributors have mentioned the Government’s heart being in the right place, and I think I agree with that, but there are three drivers behind this Bill, and whereas the first of them is a genuine commitment to tackling child poverty, the other two are more ignoble.

The Bill is designed in part to distract from the Government’s failure to meet the 2010-11 target, and it is also being introduced in the hope that it will serve to create the famous political dividing lines, as is characteristic of so many proposals and legislation since the current Prime Minister took office. The Bill has been introduced in the hope that the Conservatives will fall into a political trap by expressing doubts about the mechanisms it employs or its declaratory nature—or any other of a number of well-founded concerns about it. The Government hoped the Conservatives might be foolish enough to oppose the Bill so that they could be shown to be more interested in the few than the many, thus reinforcing the disgraceful and unhelpful narrative to which the Prime Minister is so dedicated. Therefore, the Government’s heart is not in the right place in two out of those three aims. Furthermore, the fact that the Government are so keen to create these dividing lines prevents us from being able to talk about the fiendishly complex problem of tackling child poverty.

I do not doubt the Government’s commitment to tackling child poverty, but in the boom period that we have recently enjoyed, the low-hanging fruit in policy terms was halving child poverty, and they did not meet their target in 2005—although they missed it by a wafer-thin margin, so I will not place too much emphasis on that. They are going to miss the 2010 child poverty target as well, and they reject spending the money that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says they could spend in order to meet that target next year. Therefore, despite the fact that they made a solemn pledge, they are saying that they will not spend the £4.3 billion on transfers to ensure that they halve child poverty. They could do that, but they have decided not to, because they recognise, as all Governments must, that they have to strike a balance between all the different priorities they are addressing. Why, therefore, would a future Government be able to do that in 10 years’ time, after what will doubtless be a much tougher decade than the past 10 years from a financial point of view? I therefore believe that that will not be done. The Government are setting us up for failure, and they are giving a false promise to people that eradication is in sight. I find the entire Bill deeply unsatisfactory.

New clause 3 is tremendously useful in asking for a report, and thereby asking the Government to talk about what they are doing now—to talk about the deadline not 10 or 11 years hence, but for tackling children being brought up in deprivation today. What are the Government doing now—this month, this quarter, next quarter, all the way through to the end of the next financial year? If they oppose the new clause, they will show that they are not interested in transparency and in looking at the here and now. They will show that they are interested not in the political realities of delivering for the poorest in our society, but in playing political games so that they can welcome the clamour of support for their long-term vision. We have had a lot of long-term visions, and the long-term vision of today is that we have ended up with record numbers of young people in unemployment.

Whenever my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) is sitting on the Front Bench, I am always minded to try to follow his lead by being less strident and more charitable—he manages to achieve that both rightly and effectively. It is, therefore, worth commenting on a few positive things the Government have done. They have invested in early child care such as the Sure Start children centres, and they have made a genuine effort to put in place early intervention, which relates to matters of interest to the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). We must judge the outcomes of today, however, and what we now have are more NEETs—young people not in education, employment or training—than when the Government came to power.

We should also consider the number of people who are on the very lowest incomes. When most people think about poverty, they think about the very poorest. When they have a Labour Government who say they want to eradicate child poverty, little would they imagine that that Government would be smug and proud of their record when the number of children in families on the very lowest incomes—not below 60 per cent. of median income, which is the technical description of relative poverty, but below 40 per cent. of median income—is at its highest for 25 years. That is the reality. The poorest are poorer under Labour, despite the investments and the genuineness of the commitments. Yet we have before us this vainglorious piece of legislation, which is designed to distract and to allow this failing Government, who have so often failed the poorest, to wrap themselves in a cloak of social justice. They do not deserve to wear it.

All this means that we are not doing enough of what the hon. Member for Upper Bann and so many others, including the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), were talking about. We should be trying to wrestle with the complexity of these issues so that we do not create perverse incentives—those affecting the poor and the rich. We want social justice and we want effectiveness, and we want it to be provided in a humane way. We do not want to play politics with looking after the poor in a way that ends up with more of them kept that way.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that in meeting the challenge of child poverty, it does not matter to which party one belongs? Child poverty is a problem facing all parties in this House, so it is vital that we reach a consensus on how we take children out of poverty and allow them to succeed in life with the backing of Government and Government policy?

I partially agree with what the hon. Gentleman says, and I certainly welcome the sentiment behind it. I am not always convinced that consensus does lead to the best results. A clash of ideas more often leads to positive outcomes than does a cosy consensus in this place. All the parties signed up to the Climate Change Act 2008, but have we seen a demonstrable change in emissions since it was passed? We have not seen it yet, but I hope that we will. I shall not go further on that; I shall stop before I am stopped, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

It is always a shame to interrupt the hon. Gentleman in full flow. May I encourage him to be a bit wary about this so-called very low-income measure of less than 40 per cent. of median income? I hope he is aware that although that accurately represents some people’s living standards, surveys of income and expenditure provide good reason to think that the measurement of income of those very low-income households is often not a good proxy for their living standards. The classic case is that of the self-employed, whose books show less than 40 per cent. but whose living standard is clearly not that at all. I am trying not to be patronising, but I discourage him from putting too much weight on this measure of less than 40 per cent., where the data really are murky.

I would always defer to the hon. Gentleman on matters of statistics, but when the official Government statistics have been reasonably consistent—he may correct me if I am wrong about this—and have shown an increase in the number of people in that category, either we have had an explosion in black market activity among families or we face a genuine problem. It is perfectly reasonable for those of us who have not slaved for many years in national statistics offices to take Government figures at face value, particularly when they show us an ugly picture of an increase in poverty among the poorest. He may patronise me as much as he likes, but until I am given comprehensive evidence to show that there has not been an increase in poverty among the poorest in this society, I shall remain concerned—even if he wants to dismiss my concern for technical reasons.

It is worth saying that we could have a clash of ideologies here, although there is so much political fear ahead of a general election that not much clashing is occurring. Historically, the Conservative party has believed—or certainly one could caricature it thus—in trickle-down economics. I remember a friend of mine sneeringly saying to me a little while ago, “I suppose you believe in trickle-down economics.” As a good Conservative, I do, to an extent. However, although the previous Conservative Government transformed the country from being the sick man of Europe—we took over from the previous economic wreckage of a Labour Government—to being a much more powerful and dynamic economy, child poverty increased, and nobody who sits on the Conservative Benches is proud of that.

We want to combine a proper recognition of the need for incentives, for hard work to be rewarded, for enterprise to be supported and for the state not to smother economic activity with ensuring that, as we grow the economy, we carry all with us and do not rely on trickle-down economics to give us the magic solution. That certainly did not happen under the previous Conservative Government.

I noticed the hon. Gentleman’s phrase about hard work being rewarded, and there is a problem in that a lot of the children in poverty have one or more parents working. Would he be happy to support a higher minimum wage and, in fact, a living wage?

That is a fair question and it would need to be considered. We do not want to price people—particularly single parents who are inflexible in what they can do in the workplace because of their family commitments—out of accessing the marketplace. It is not a battle between those who do not care and those who care and want a higher minimum wage. It is a really tough judgment call to get the right thing for the country as a whole and for the poorest in particular. That is an argument that I would be happy to engage in with the hon. Gentleman. I do not have any firm views on it, and his expertise might easily eclipse mine.

We talked about social cohesion and, as hon. Members have mentioned, households in chaos. We have to deal with that. What do we do when we take measures? I fear that this Bill could end up enabling transfers of money to households, rewarding and reinforcing chaotic lifestyles. The Minister has had nothing to say about that. In fact, one of the Ministers who is on the Front Bench—the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman)—said in Committee, extraordinarily:

“The Government are not wholly convinced that family breakdown is a cause of poverty”.

She actually said that. If she wants to intervene, I would be happy to allow her to retract that today. She said:

“The Government are not wholly convinced that family breakdown is a cause of poverty; on the contrary, we tend to hold the view that poverty is a cause of family breakdown.”––[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2009; c. 15, Q44.]

Of course poverty is a cause of family breakdown. Of course the tensions and pressures of poverty might exacerbate tensions in a family. However, to suggest that family breakdown does not push people into poverty is entirely to misunderstand what happens to families. The fact that we have a Minister on the Front Bench with such a perverse and peculiar view undermines my confidence that the Government know what they are doing.

The hon. Gentleman is making a very interesting case, as usual, which is being enjoyed by Members of all parties. Does he agree that this Bill is fundamentally about the kind of country that we want to be and that it is also about priorities and assurances? Where does that rate in his priorities?

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. I shall try to answer him as straightforwardly as I can. I personally do not support putting child poverty targets on a statutory footing when we have not assessed all deprivation and when we have not considered the plight of the disabled, the elderly poor or any number of other groups. We have not considered the other priorities—we could be at war in eight years’ time. All Governments want the best outcomes for the most people and have a particular interest—they certainly should—in looking after the most vulnerable and the weakest in our society. Should we—the hon. Gentleman will have to forgive me, as I know that he is not a cynical Member of this place—prioritise this issue for cynical electoral reasons so that the Government can capture a headline and distract from their failures?

Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that all the studies that are based on Department for Work and Pensions stats, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation study, show that it is children who are most likely to be in poverty in the UK today? That is the point of this legislation. They are the single foremost group. We can identify within that group which household structures and which income structures lead people to be in poverty, but overwhelmingly it is children who are at risk of poverty.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. Single parent households are twice as likely to be in poverty, according to the Government figures, as two-parent households. We have a Minister who suggests that family breakdown is not a cause, and suggestions have been made that to try to eradicate the disincentives and built-in biases against couples in the benefits and tax system is an attack on single-parent families. I would have hoped that the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), who takes a profound interest in such matters, would support the Opposition, who believe that we need a level playing field. We certainly do not need to reinforce the pressures on couples to split up because of perverse incentives in the benefit system.

I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman would quote the figures from Department for Work and Pensions tables or from the Rowntree study that show that single-parent households are twice as likely as two-parent households to be in poverty. I acknowledge that there might be a greater likelihood of that, but I would be very surprised to hear those figures, and I would be grateful if he would quote them.

I hope that it is not because of blind prejudice that the hon. Lady has not looked at the basic figures.

rose—

I am happy to give way to my hon. Friend, who is a master of such figures and will share them with the House.

I am happy to intervene briefly on my hon. Friend to give the Government’s figures on HBAI for 2007-08, from which the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) has frequently quoted. Table 4 on page 66 shows that the chance of being in poverty is 36 per cent. for a child of lone parents and 18 per cent. for a child of a couple—half that rate. Those are the Government’s own figures from a central DWP document on child poverty.

One would hope that in a less febrile battle between false political narratives one would not even need to see the tables; one needs only common sense to see that that is likely to happen. No one wants to stigmatise single parents or to pretend that anyone lives in a model family, least of all today, but one must recognise the realities and try to support people in staying together and to minimise what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead said were the supply routes into poverty. That should be a common cause across the House. It is a shame that we have to read out tables to get people to do what common sense should tell them as a matter of course. That is a key appeal from me.

When debating new clauses 3 and 2, we need to talk about the causes of poverty. That is a complex area, and we need cross-party working and understanding without playing games. On Second Reading, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said that the Bill would hold the Government of the day’s feet to the fire to ensure that aims on child poverty were delivered. My duty—not in 2018 or 2090, but right now, as a Member of Parliament who represents many poor families and poor children—is to try to hold this Government to the fire for solemn pledges that they have made, but they do not even want to make a report to the House to ’fess up to what is happening. The failure to do that and to agree this new clause suggests that we will not be doing everything we can to minimise the number of children in child poverty, not in 10 or 12 years’ time, but right now in the coming months.

I now have to announce the result of a Division deferred from a previous day. On the motion relating to environmental protection, the Ayes were 284 and the Noes were 192, so the Question was agreed to.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

It is always a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart). I note that during his speech he was in his new charitable guise. Despite that, I am grateful for having been called to speak after him. It is rather better that I should follow him than the other way around.

In Committee, I thought that we were getting very close to a university lecture in semantics at times. We learned that eradication meant no such thing, certainly in terms of how the general public would understand it. Similarly, I think that we are in danger of looking at child poverty through the eyes of the House alone and not those of people outside, and of seeing it purely in statistical terms rather than in the wider terms that people outside would see it. Looking at it through those eyes, I do not see how we can achieve the general aim of eradicating child poverty in that broader sense simply through clauses 2 to 5, so I rise to speak in support of new clause 2 and the consequential amendments that deal with the causes of child poverty. We cannot deal with child poverty adequately without considering its causes and how we might break the cycle of deprivation. I agree that income has to be a substantial part of that, but I want to talk about why considering income alone would be inadequate.

In the period between Committee and Report, I have had the privilege of being able to talk to a number of organisations that work to combat child poverty. I have spoken to them in some depth about the Bill and their approach to child poverty in general. One of the things that they welcome is that the Bill sets a framework. They are not necessarily in agreement that it is the right framework, but they agree that there should be a framework. One of the consistent things that has come out of my conversations with them is that they too see the difficulty with a framework that is built only on income targets without taking into account the importance of the family and the broader context that others have spoken about today.

In Committee, the Government tried to argue that the broader context would be dealt with through the mechanisms in clause 8. I shall return to that in a moment but, if that is true and the Bill contains a recognition of that context—through the mechanism of material deprivation, for example—one has to ask why there is no consistency. Why is the recognition of the broader context in one part of the Bill not reflected in the targets at the beginning of the Bill? New clause 2 would rectify that problem.

I still have a great problem: I struggle to see how part 1 and part 2 are linked. It is perfectly right to have local government involved in delivering much of the work needed to help to eradicate child poverty, but that work is about the causes of the poverty and the cycle of deprivation. We heard from, among others, Paul Carter, the leader of Kent county council. He told us how that council was pulling the work together, and not just in recent years: it had been a long journey lasting six, seven or eight years, which had included integrating the work with the delivery of education.

The county council that covers my constituency has taken the same joined-up approach involving education and the primary care trust, with the aim of looking at the causes of child poverty and helping to overcome it. It is a shame that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) is not in his seat at the moment, as that approach goes part of the way to answering the concerns that he raised about how we get to the root causes of child poverty.

In some ways, the Government have recognised that one way to get to those root causes is to use local government. That is what part 2 of the Bill is about, but the Government have not linked part 2 with the targets in part 1 to achieve the sort of broad target that new clause 2 calls for.

We also heard evidence from Charlotte Pickles from the Centre for Social Justice about the need to see things in a family context. She made the point that we need to make sure that the increases in money provided to try to eradicate poverty reach the child, and that it is not unfairly diverted to other causes in any of the various possible ways. I was struck by her comment in her evidence of 22 October, when she said:

“of course, you need to address income levels but that cannot be the sole thing. Unfortunately, the Bill is framed in such a way that we feel that the point of looking at a wider perspective may be lost.”––[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 82-83, Q7.]

I think that that goes to the heart of new clause 2 and the consequential amendments that flow from it. We need to move towards that broader picture.

In Committee, I was astonished that the Minister seemed unable to make the connections between other factors and child poverty, or to see the problem in a way that was not compartmentalised but in the round. In response to question 13, Charlotte Pickles said:

“If your targets are solely focused on income, and not on other issues around poverty, you are not measuring what is necessarily going to bring that child out of poverty.”––[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 86, Q13.]

When taken with the broader context of the family, that child focus was extremely helpful.

However, we did not hear only from Charlotte Pickles and the Centre for Social Justice, as we also heard Neil O’Brien from the Policy Exchange talk about the narrowness of the targets in the Bill. There has been some talk to the effect that the current targets at least give focus. I admit that they do give a focus on income, but that is surely not enough: we have to make sure that the focus is complete, and that it is the right focus. I am far from convinced that that is the case, and it goes to the heart of the Bill’s extremely poor structure.

The hon. Gentleman has made some interesting points, but does he agree that income is the cornerstone of the Bill and that, frankly, everything else—whether health and well-being, the family unit or any of the other issues relating to opportunity—cannot be addressed unless we centralise our efforts first and foremost on income?

I am not arguing that we should not take income into account. I have not heard anyone in the evidence sessions in Committee or in the House on Second Reading or today say that income is not an important element; but surely the hon. Gentleman cannot claim that income is everything. It cannot form the complete picture.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I fear that I was not as clear as I might have been. I am not taking issue with him at all. I simply say that income is at the heart of everything that we do. The other issues that he talks of, which are exceptionally important, cannot be progressed in any way unless we first address the income issue.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, but I look at it the other way around. We need to ensure that the increase in income that we use to help to eradicate child poverty is well used and that no other factor will come into play to prevent it from having the maximum effect, but we cannot tell that at the moment, because we do not see in the Bill how to deal with the causes of deprivation and poverty—what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead referred to as stopping the flow of negativity that enters the system and produces the root causes of the problem.

I well recall the comment in Committee that the Bill already took such things into account with the emphasis on material deprivation and the need to consider them in the strategy, but what stuck in my mind most in reading the report of the Committee proceedings was the information that the data on assessing material deprivation were so weak. So why is an imperfect measure buried in the Bill, when new clause 2 could provide us with a much better measure of the things that material deprivation indicates we are struggling to move towards. We must not view the issue in terms of narrow statistics. I do not want too many targets in any Bill, but nor do I want targets that skew the Bill and our actions towards income only.

In Committee, if I remember correctly, the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) was sceptical and said that too many targets would allow the Government too much wriggle room. If there were 10 targets, they could say that they had achieved seven of them and therefore that they had met their goals, but those seven targets might not be the most important ones. I take that point—it is one of the things that needs to be worked out—but I do not believe that the process is impractical to achieve.

Those hon. Members who have been involved in the management of businesses may well have come across the concept of the balanced scorecard, by which the most important quadrants of a business’s activities are divided and a handful of measures used to manage the business to achieve those objectives. Almost all those objectives are not single ones; they are baskets of objectives in which decisions are made about the importance of each in achieving the overall objective in each quadrant.

The methodology exists and is being used effectively in business and local government. In the days when I was a councillor, I happened to be responsible for introducing a balanced scorecard approach to my county council, and the management of the council’s business improved almost overnight as a result, because of the clarity and decision making there had to be, not just in respect of headline-grabbing targets but in respect of targets all the way through. [Interruption.] I think the Minister is trying to intervene on me, is she not?

indicated dissent.

Ah, the hon. Lady is just making faces in response to my comments. If she would like a lecture on the balanced scorecard and how to do targets, she could make an appointment afterwards. I am very happy to share with national Government the knowledge and expertise that I have gained from local government.

I am almost at the end of my contribution. The point has been made that it is practical to look at a way of approaching targets based on the causes of poverty, instead of just sticking to the narrow and somewhat misleading targets that have been set in the Bill.

I shall speak to new clauses 1, 2 and 3, and amendments 1 to 20, 23, 24, 33, and 34.

New clause 1, which the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) moved, would include in the Bill a target for relative low income measured after housing costs. The consequential amendments are amendments 1 to 20. The new clause would impose a new target that is additional, as he knows, to the relative low income before housing costs target in clause 2 and the other targets in clauses 3 to 5.

Whether poverty should be measured before or after housing costs and the impact of housing quality on children’s outcomes were debated at some length in Committee. I emphasise that the Government recognise the importance of housing costs to families’ disposable incomes and the impact of those costs on their living standards. That is why the Government have placed, and will continue to place, significant focus on the availability of affordable homes. For example, the latest investment of £290 million at the end of November, delivering almost 5,500 affordable homes throughout 149 local authority areas, brought total Government help for house building since June to £1.8 billion.

Will the Minister give way?

Not yet, if the hon. Gentleman would just be a little patient.

As we discussed in Committee, however, there is a number of reasons why the Government have chosen to use before-housing-costs measures of poverty in the Bill. First, measures of housing quality are currently included in the list of items that are used for the combined low income and material deprivation measure, so if a child is experiencing poor housing, that will be reflected in their material deprivation score. More importantly, families who cannot afford items because of their high costs, such as high housing costs, will be picked up in the material deprivation measure. For example, looking at poverty statistics by region, it is clear, using the combined measure, that London has a far higher average risk of poverty than the relative low income measure would suggest, highlighting the additional costs—particularly the high housing costs—of living in London.

Secondly, it is important to note—

Will the Minister give way now?

No.

Secondly, it is important to note the drawbacks associated with an after-housing-costs measure. As the hon. Member for Northavon said, measuring income after housing costs can understate some individuals’ relative standard of living because they pay more for better-quality accommodation. Conversely, income measures that do not deduct housing costs may overstate the living standards of people whose housing costs are high relative to the quality of their accommodation. Therefore, the relative low income indicator before housing costs, in conjunction with the combined low income and material deprivation indicator, ensures that we effectively capture the issue of affordability of housing. Given the drawbacks of the alternatives, we consider the material deprivation indicator to be a better way of capturing the impact of housing costs.

The hon. Gentleman asked why housing benefit should be included as income in the before-housing-costs measure of poverty. The obvious answer is that housing benefit is income, but I shall give him a fuller response than that. Households in receipt of housing benefit pay their housing costs using their total income, including housing benefit. Households that do not receive housing benefit need to pay their housing costs from their total income. Including housing benefit enables like-for-like comparison between the incomes that households have with which to pay housing costs and to meet their other needs. To deduct housing benefit from the income of those who receive it would be to underestimate the total income that they had with which to meet their housing costs and other needs.

Will the Minister give way?

rose—

I give way to the hon. Member for Northavon.

Can I ask the Minister a simple question? If I were to give her a fiver and take a fiver out of her purse, would she feel better off?

That is not a very difficult trick question, because, as the hon. Gentleman knows, housing benefit rates vary around the country to take account of the different costs of housing in different parts of the country.

The hon. Member for Northavon asked a slightly more tricky question when he gave the example of two pensioners living next door to each other, one of whom owned their house and one of whom was on housing benefit, with the latter appearing to be better off on a before-housing-costs basis. There are similar arguments against an after-housing-costs measure. Imagine two families on the same income and with the same number of children. One family decides to spend a lot of money on a house in a nice area, and the other decides to spend less on housing because they have other priorities. On an after-housing-costs measure, the first family are considered to be poorer. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman can see the logic of my case.

We discussed in Committee the fact that other European countries measure poverty before housing costs. We have stated our ambition to be among the best in Europe. The ability to make comparisons is vital because they allow us to benchmark our performance.

The new clause would not change the approach to measuring child poverty set out in the Bill; instead, it would add a further target to the Bill, which we do not consider necessary. As members of the Committee, including the hon. Gentleman, highlighted, further targets run the risk of creating a lack of focus. Having four comprehensive targets covering financial poverty is sufficient and enables us to capture the different facets of poverty. As noted, the combined low income and material deprivation indicator will ensure that those whose high housing costs impact on their living standards will be captured.

The new clause proposes a target level for the measure of less than 10 per cent. The level of less than 10 per cent. for the before-housing-costs relative low income measure in clause 2 was selected on the basis that that is the lowest that has been achieved and maintained over time in other modern European economies. The vast majority of European countries publish poverty statistics using only a before-housing-costs measure of relative low income, so there are no comparative data to establish whether a target of 10 per cent. on an after-housing-costs measure is either realistic or in line with our ambition to be among the best in Europe.

Although the targets in the Bill should be ambitious and stretching, they should not be unrealistic. The present level of relative poverty after housing costs is 31 per cent., or 4 million children. Meeting the proposed target would require a reduction to fewer than 1.3 million. I would argue that it is unrealistic to envisage our achieving that in the next 10 years. We published the principles of our child poverty strategy in today’s pre-Budget report, outlining five principles, including cost-effectiveness and affordability. That is key if we are to meet our objectives in a sustainable manner.

I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that in preparing a UK child poverty strategy, consideration must be given to any necessary measures required in respect of housing to support the tackling of child poverty, as set out in clause 8(5)(d). We are currently analysing the impact of housing on child poverty to inform the first child poverty strategy, and that analysis will determine the key principles for that policy area and, subsequently, appropriate monitoring arrangements.

Finally, we are committed to ensuring that the “Households Below Average Income” series continues to publish income figures after housing costs, so that it will always be possible to monitor child poverty trends on an after-housing-costs basis and to keep under review the impact of housing costs on families’ living standards.

The Minister may not have been passionate in her espousal of the importance of housing in tackling poverty, but she has at least acknowledged it, and I welcome the extra money that is coming to the East Riding of Yorkshire for additional affordable housing. Can she explain, however, why a Government supposedly committed to eradicating child poverty have built fewer houses in any year of their time in government than were built in any year of the previous Conservative Administration?

I have described this afternoon the investment that we are making, which is providing a record improvement in the decent homes standard. That is having a significant impact on people’s standard of living.

New clause 2 and amendment 23, tabled by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), suggest that regulations under the Bill should set targets on a potentially wide range of outcomes that can be said to be the causes of child poverty, and that the child poverty strategy should set out what progress needs to be made to address those causes in order to meet the targets in clauses 2 to 5. The causes of poverty drew comments from many Members in the debate, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who brought his usual compassionate and well informed perspective to bear.

My right hon. Friend began by congratulating the Government on their excellent record and the scale of their ambition to tackle child poverty, but he suggested that the Government’s approach had been too mechanistic. I point out to him that we are not focusing simply on incomes, taxes and benefits but, as I think he acknowledged, we are also tackling worklessness and education issues. He suggested that benefits had been increased too much compared with income, so I hope that he will welcome the better-off credit that the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced earlier. It will ensure that everybody in full-time work is better off. I remind him also of the significant reductions in the marginal deduction rates that we have recently achieved.

In the discussion about the root causes of poverty, the hon. Members for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), for Upper Bann (David Simpson), for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) and for Henley (John Howell) mentioned family formation. It would not be particularly fruitful for me to detain the House on that matter for long, but I point out that it is extremely difficult to say precisely what is the correlation between family structure and poverty levels. I remind hon. Members of the experience in Denmark, which has the highest level of lone parenthood in western Europe but also comes out at the top of the UNICEF table on child well-being. The lesson that we can learn from that is that the structures and policies that we put in place are far more significant than particular matters of family formation. In any case, it is not clear that those matters are under the Government’s control.

Of course it is important that any Government tackle the broad range of issues and policy areas related to poverty. Clause 8 requires the UK child poverty strategy to do precisely that, but that does not mean that targets on them should be set in the Bill, as that would risk diluting the clear focus on income poverty and material deprivation that is at its heart. Such issues were debated substantially in Committee, and I refer hon. Members to the arguments that were expressed. As we said then, income poverty and material deprivation must be at the heart of the Bill because of the evidence of the impact that they have on children’s lives, both in their experiences now and their chances for the future. Income poverty has an impact on children’s education, health and social lives, the relationships with and between their parents and their future life chances.

Does the Minister not agree that making progress on dealing with the causes of poverty is very likely to result in the Government achieving their income poverty targets? The two go together.

If the hon. Gentleman had been a little more patient, he would have heard me make a similar point.

Our strategy needs to be multi-faceted if we are to break into generational cycles of poverty, and so truly end child poverty. That multi-faceted approach is supported by the Bill. The UK strategy will need to meet both purposes set out in clause 8(2). As well as showing how the targets will be met, the strategy must meet the purpose of ensuring, as far as possible, that children in the UK do not experience socio-economic disadvantage. That second purpose ensures that the strategy will be broad in scope and that it will focus on a wide range of policy areas, rather than relying on a narrow range of policies related simply to raising household income through financial support.

Moreover, clause 8(5) establishes that the strategy must consider what measures if any ought to be taken across a range of key policy areas. Those building blocks of the strategy have been determined on evidence that shows that those policy areas have the potential to make the biggest impact in tackling the causes and consequences of growing up in income poverty. It follows that amendment 24 is unnecessary, because the strategies will already need to set out the specific actions that need to be taken to meet the targets, and the annual reports will monitor delivery, tracking a wide range of indicators that may change over time, as determined by the needs of the strategy.

As well as being unnecessary, amendment 24 is unhelpful and problematic, because it seeks to require the strategy to define causal relationships that in reality are tenuous and difficult to establish. The strategies will review the evidence on the underlying causes of poverty, seeking to establish clear evidence of causal relationships where they exist, but the problem with amendment 24 is that in many cases it is not possible to establish evidence of clear causal relationships. In many cases, the evidence shows that there are strong associations or connections between growing up in relative poverty and material deprivation, and experiencing poor intermediate outcomes in a range of areas, including educational attainment, health and other aspects of well-being. It also shows that there are strong associations between those intermediate outcomes and the risk of experiencing poor final outcomes in adulthood, including the risk of experiencing poverty and material deprivation. However, the causal relationship goes both ways. Income poverty has both direct and indirect effects on other policy areas, including health and education. Defining the causes of poverty, as the amendments would require, is therefore not possible to achieve at present owing to gaps in the evidence base and limitations in the data available.

The development of the strategy will involve identifying those groups of children most at risk of being in poverty, including particularly vulnerable groups, and assessing what action needs to be taken to meet all the targets on income poverty and material deprivation. The indicators that should be tracked will change over time, as determined by the needs of the strategy, but our ultimate goal—the ending of child poverty—remains constant.

I shall now turn to new clause 3, which was tabled by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire. I understand the need for transparency on progress towards the 2010 target. However, I shall explain why the new clause is unnecessary. Opposition Members have been full of doom and gloom about our prospects for 2010 and achieving those targets—the hon. Gentleman asked a number of questions about where we are and where we think we are going to be in the light of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcements.

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government previously forecast that measures taken since 2008 would reduce child poverty by a further 500,000 in relative terms, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the number is 600,000. The measures that the Chancellor announced earlier today will produce a further reduction of at least 50,000. He announced an extension of free school meals entitlement to primary age children whose parents are on working tax credits, and an increase in child benefit of 1.5 per cent. in April 2010, which is well ahead of what it would be if we had stuck with the indexation in legislation. I contrast that with the freezing of child benefit under the previous Administration, which meant that by 1997 it was lower in real terms than when they took office in 1979.

I understand that it has been revealed since the pre-Budget report—it was not apparent in the statement—that the 1.5 per cent. increase in child benefit is actually a draw-down of the following year’s increase. The following year will have not a full inflation increase but inflation less 1.5 per cent.—a real-terms cut. Was the Minister aware of that?

I do not think that there will be a real-terms cut in the following year as the hon. Gentleman suggests. I will write to him on that point.

I turn now to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris). Amendment 33 would add a further regulation-making power to clause 6, enabling the Secretary of State to make regulations setting out the circumstances in which a child living in “communal accommodation” may be regarded as living in a qualifying household. That came out of the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which the hon. Gentleman is a member. I would like to make it very clear that our goal is to eradicate poverty for all children: the framework that the Bill establishes for achieving that goal—using national child poverty strategies and duties on local government—applies to all children in the UK.

To ensure accountability for and progress towards the goal, clauses 2 to 5 define targets for a range of poverty indicators. As I am sure hon. Members appreciate, those targets will be effective only if progress towards them is measurable. That is why they do not apply to children who are not covered by the surveys that we use to measure poverty. Targets for those children would not be measurable, and therefore would be an ineffective way to ensure that their experiences of poverty are tackled. The Bill therefore sets out that the targets apply only to children living in “qualifying households”.

For many children living in communal establishments, the concept of household income is simply inapplicable. However, we have other policies to address the well-being of those children. For example, in residential care homes, minimum requirements include the provision of healthy meals, clothes and sufficient financial resources.

I am concerned to satisfy the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, because these issues are especially important. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that the targets discriminate against children not living in qualifying households. In fact, the targets do not discriminate, as only actions can discriminate. He is making a jump in logic and setting up a situation that assumes that the policy that flows from the targets will be discriminatory. That is a mistake and that is why, with the reassurance that the objectives apply to all children, I hope that he will not press his amendments. I hope that other hon. Members also will not press their amendments.

It is good to see the House filling up for my views on the after housing costs measure of income.

We have had an unexpectedly full debate on this group of amendments and one of the key points that the Minister made is that measuring income after housing costs has many flaws. That makes me wonder why her Department publishes so many statistics on that basis every year. It is presumably because they complement the before housing costs measures, because they tell us different things. Each measure has its relative advantages and disadvantages, and that is why the Department publishes both. To pick one for the purpose of legislation seems inconsistent to me.

The Minister said that we need international comparisons, and my amendment would not prevent those being included. She says that 10 per cent. is an arbitrary figure—obviously it would be the same for before housing costs—and that it is unobtainable. She seems to think that we will just have to live with 1.3 million children in poverty after housing costs. That is a very depressing prospect for the coming decade.

Will the hon. Gentleman address the Minister’s example of two families in identical positions, one of whom decide to spend more of their disposable income on housing—perhaps living in a better area and because it has better schools, which will help the children exit poverty? Under his proposal, we could beat up the Government for the fact that parents, because they have behaved in their children’s best interests, appear poor, whereas under the single definition, they would not be.

Indeed. That is why a single measure, either before or after housing costs, does not give the full picture. Were housing costs always about housing quality, I would take the right hon. Gentleman’s point, but often they are only poorly related to housing quality. Measuring income before and after housing costs, therefore, gives us a fuller picture. The Minister did not respond to my example. She repeated it, but she did not explain why the before housing costs would not be inaccurate in my example. For different circumstances, the two measures would be more or less accurate, which is why we need both.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), in an impassioned contribution, raised concerns about the number of children in very low—below 40 per cent.—income households. I raised concerns about the data, and having checked the official figures, I can say that the figures below 40 per cent. are not published on a regular basis, because of doubts about their validity, especially with regard to the self-employed. He asked fairly why the figures show what they do, but I am not convinced that they necessarily show anything more than just problems with the data. However, that is unclear, and clearly we need good data, so I take his point.

The comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) were informed by his membership of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. He raised an issue that I had not thought of, and I do not think that the Minister’s response will offer him the reassurance that he seeks. As the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said, we have part 1 and part 2. Part 1 children are those who find their way into surveys, and part 2 children are those about whom local authorities have to do something. Part 1 children are privileged in the Bill because they have their own targets and the child poverty commission and so on. That infrastructure does not support the sort of children about whom my hon. Friend was talking, so he raises a valid point. As the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) said, separate targets for the groups in part 1 might be the only way forward. I do not think that they can be melded into the existing targets, so they might need targets of their own.

The Minister asked me whether I was happy, but then sat down before I could intervene. Does my hon. Friend agree that the matter will be looked at again in the House of Lords? The Minister’s assertion that the Joint Committee said that targets discriminate is incorrect; we were careful to say that it was not the targets, but what might flow from them, that discriminates. The problem was not solved by her response.

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I am sure that their lordships will want to return to that issue.

In summary, it became apparent a few hours ago, during the pre-Budget statement, that the Government have given up on the 2010 target. Independent estimates suggest that £4 billion or £5 billion might have been needed to ensure that the 2010 target was met, but there was nothing of the sort in the pre-Budget statement. The Government have therefore run up the white flag on their target of halving child poverty. That is why new clause 3 and a report on the 2010 target would be valuable.

Our argument on new clause 1 is not that after housing costs are the only valid measure, but that they complement existing measures. I have heard nothing from the Minister that dissuades me from that view, so I seek to test the opinion of the House.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Government amendment 21.

Amendment 35, in clause 9, page 5, line 21, at end insert—

‘(ba) must consult the Children’s Commissioners for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland,’.

Amendment 27, page 5, line 22, leave out first ‘or’ and insert ‘families and’.

Amendment 36, page 5, line 22, leave out first ‘or’ and insert ‘and’.

Amendment 28, in clause 22, page 14, line 1, leave out first ‘or’ and insert ‘families and’.

I shall be brief in speaking to this new clause on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which reported on the Bill on 10 November. There are two sets of Liberal Democrat amendments in this group, the first of which, new clause 4, proposes that the Secretary of State should have a duty to implement the strategy on child poverty reduction. The second set—amendments 35 and 36—is about consulting children and the representatives of children.

Let me deal with new clause 4 first. In our report, we identified that, unlike in what might be considered comparable statutory regimes set out in legislation such as the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, there is no statutory duty in the Bill to implement the strategy. We engaged in correspondence with the Government to ask why that was. We support in principle having statutory duties to implement, as Parliament wishes, access to economic and social rights. That makes sense, as far as we are concerned, and we find it disappointing that there is no such duty regarding the strategy.

I have looked carefully at new clause 4 and read the relevant comments in the Joint Committee’s report on the Bill, and I am not enamoured of the new clause. It should be up to the Government to decide how to achieve their objectives. As the Minister said in Committee, the Bill includes clear targets. The Government will be held to account in the House, by way of the annual statement to Parliament, and I expect that occasion to be well attended and one on which the relevant Minister will be pressed very hard if sufficient progress has not been made. The press and media, the lobby groups that take an interest in these matters, the charities and many people in the voluntary sector will ensure that a good amount of pressure and focus is put on the targets.

It is a worrying development to bring judges into the Bill to the extent that new clause 4 would do, so I am afraid that I am not with the hon. Gentleman on the new clause. However, I am more inclined to support amendments 35 and 36. It is right that the Government should speak to children. I find it hard to conceive that local or central Government could have any set of policies or provide any service without speaking to the people for whom those services are provided or for whom those policies are designed to assist.

My hon. Friends the Members for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) and for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) and I tabled amendments 27 and 28, which I think are superior to the hon. Gentleman’s amendments, because they would require the Government to speak not only to children, as his amendment would, but to the families. I absolutely understand the focus on children and child poverty, but it would be strange to go to a poor family—the Government measure poverty by considering the poverty of parents or guardians as well as that of their children—and speak to the children but not to their parents. That would not be the right approach, and amendment 27 and 28 would remedy that omission.

Government amendment 21 will ensure that child care is included in the Bill. That very welcome concession is one of the few that the Government have made as a result of the debates in Committee, and it is good to know that all our labours were not wholly in vain in Committee.

It is worth noting in passing that under the Welfare Reform Act 2009, the Government sought to impose sanctions on lone parents when their children were only three years old and that the Conservative party made sure that the age was raised to five, when children go to school, as that is quite young enough to start imposing sanctions on parents. However, the point about child care is important. If we are to require lone parents—separated parents—to seek work when their children reach the age of 5, we must absolutely ensure that child care is in place. It has to be in place before school, on occasions, if there is a journey to work, after work, and, particularly importantly, in the holidays. Part-time and flexible work is incredibly important for that group of parents, many of whom seek to enter the labour market for the first time and are unable to make the step to full-time work, although they may aspire to it.

It is worth noting that there has not been universal success on child care as far as the Government are concerned. In fact, in 2008, more child care places closed down than were created. The child minder work force is in steep decline, and many private sector child care providers are having great difficulties. Although I welcome the inclusion of child care, I think that the Government need to address some significant issues to ensure that child care is adequate and that separated parents in particular can get into work.

I shall speak to new clause 4 and amendments 21, 27, 28, 35 and 36, which have been grouped because they all relate to UK strategies.

I shall respond to the points that the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) made on new clause 4, which seeks to impose a duty on the Secretary of State to implement the measures in a UK child poverty strategy. Like the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), I do not believe that the proposed change is necessary. The Bill sets four challenges, which, if met, would represent a considerable achievement. The legal duty to meet those targets is absolute, and it is supported by the duty in clause 8 to publish and lay before Parliament a strategy setting out the measures that the Secretary of State proposes to take to meet them.

The intention is clear: the strategy will drive forward action to achieve the targets. If there is a failure by the Government to take sufficient action, as detailed in the strategy, the targets will not be met and that may result in a judicial review. That clearly places very strong pressure on the Government to implement the measures set out in a strategy. There is a significant difference between this legislation and the legislation that the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon noted. The Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 require the Government to implement strategies to achieve their goals, but they do not contain legally binding targets, unlike the Bill before us, which does contain such targets.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights stated that it is not incompatible to have both a duty to meet the targets and a duty to implement the strategy. I understand the theoretical point, but in practice there is no need for both duties. In fact, a duty to implement the strategy could be unhelpful and have unintended consequences that distract us from the important goals in the Bill. Such a duty risks binding the Government to take measures that may turn out to be less effective than was originally envisaged, or that could have negative outcomes that damage progress towards the target.

The Joint Committee is not convinced that the inclusion of a duty to implement the strategy necessarily results in inflexibility. However, surely the hon. Gentleman can see that the Government would be put in an extremely difficult position. If the Government did not take action to implement measures that, at that point in time, they understood to be harmful or ineffective, they would be infringing the duty to implement the strategy; but, if the Government did take action in the circumstances, implementing the strategy could be argued to be an improper use of public money, because they would have implemented a strategy that had been discovered to be ineffective.

As a consequence, the Government would need to lay down a new strategy every time data emerged suggesting that a measure was not working. Apart from the impracticalities that would clearly result from that, the practical effect would be that attention would be diverted from the real object, which is bringing down child poverty. A far more sensible approach is contained in clause 8, which requires that the strategy must be revised and refreshed at least every three years, ensuring that new developments and evidence about the best way to tackle child poverty are constantly taken into account in the development of future strategies, which gives the flexibility that we will need.

I understand what the hon. Lady says, but I remind her that in the Government’s own Bills they often have to go back and tidy up some of the drafting, so I do not take that as a massive minus point on our part.

On the central point, does the hon. Lady agree that it is slightly strange to go into a household—let us call it that for a moment—to speak to the children without any reference to the people responsible for them, be they the guardian, both parents or one parent in the case of those living with a separated parent? If the intention is to speak to children, to which she says the Government are committed, it would be natural to speak to the families in which those children live as well.

Obviously one would not want to consult children without the permission of their parents. That would not be appropriate, but we do want to hear the views of children specifically. The JCHR made specific reference to article 12 of the UN convention on the rights of the child, and the attractive element of the amendments is the opportunity to give local authorities and the Secretary of State the chance to consult organisations and children.

Amendment 35 refers to the Children’s Commissioners. Of course we recognise that they have particular expertise in this area, and they are exactly the sort of body that we had in mind in the reference in clause 9(4)(c) to

“organisations working with or representing children”.

It is therefore not clear why the amendment suggests a specific reference to the Children’s Commissioners, as it is unnecessary.

We are clear that the development of both national and local child poverty strategies should benefit from input by children, and I argue that the provisions in the Bill go a long way towards ensuring that their views are properly taken into account. We want the strategies developed under the Bill to be as effective as possible, and we recognise that one step towards achieving that is to ensure that they are informed by the views of those experiencing poverty. The challenge is more about how to put that into practice effectively than about the precise requirements set out in the Bill. I am concerned that amendment 35 would not actually help to ensure that the strategy more effectively reflected the views of children or their families.

I am sure that this is not what hon. Members intend, but it is possible that the amendments could become little more than a process requirement, imposing additional bureaucratic burdens that would not help us to understand the concerns of children and families experiencing poverty or make our strategy more effective. In other words, there is a balance to be struck. We do not want to place process burdens on the Secretary of State and local authorities, particularly at a time when we are all conscious of the need to be careful with public money. On the other hand, I appreciate the concerns expressed by hon. Members and organisations outside the House that the Bill does not spell out as clearly as it could our intention to seek the views of children. Although I ask hon. Members not to press the amendments, we are prepared to consider whether amendment 36 would improve the Bill. If my colleague Lord McKenzie feels that it would be helpful, we will introduce it in the other place.

I am pleased to be able to speak at this stage, although I had hoped to be able to speak to the next group of amendments.

My hon. Friend the Minister mentioned the processes in the Bill for consulting those experiencing poverty, and she said that the Government had brought forward their proposal to include child care in the Bill because of its particular role in tackling child poverty. In preparation for Report, I consulted in a community in my constituency where there is a high concentration of families with children living in poverty. I talked to people about their concerns, and a key one, which led to my tabling amendment 32, which is in the next group, was the overcrowding that they experience. I hoped that that would be mentioned in the Bill. I wish to make a couple of points about the consultation, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will respond to them.

When I went around the estate in Southfields, half the people I asked about their experience of poverty and the places in which they lived told me they were living in overcrowded conditions and that that was one of their prime difficulties. The feature of overcrowding that is the biggest problem to them—it is why I wanted overcrowding as well as child care, which Government amendment 21 proposes, in the Bill—is that people have to sleep in living rooms. That is a fact of material deprivation that I had hoped the Government would have taken on board and included among the indicators.

May I give an example to my hon. Friend the Minister? As she will know from Committee, right back in 1935, when there was a debate about poor families, children and housing in east London, a Labour MP said

“the right hon. Gentleman’s standards as regards overcrowding are not”

normal. He continued:

“He contemplates as a normal thing that living rooms should be used as bedrooms. I can never agree to that…in ordinary circumstances”.

He went on to say that if we accept that people should be required to sleep in living rooms,

“we shall be heading for the creation of new slums.”—[Official Report, 20 May 1935; Vol. 302, c. 42-44.]

My hon. Friend has persisted in making those points over the course of consideration of the Bill, and they are indeed extremely important. I can inform her that the Department for Work and Pensions intends to pilot a new question for inclusion in the family resources survey, asking families with children about the space they have available in their homes for leisure and family activities. I hope she regards that as significant progress on that front.

I am grateful for that, and perhaps my hon. Friend will spell that out more fully on Third Reading, so that we can be absolutely clear that families with children will be regarded as entitled to have a living space in which nobody has to sleep, so they can have space for recreation, family activities, doing homework, and all the other things the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) will regard as important in supporting family life. I look forward to speaking further on the matter if we reach the next group of amendments.

I rise to speak to amendment 27, which deals with consulting families. On page 5, the Bill states:

“In preparing a UK strategy, the Secretary of State…must consult…local authorities…Scottish Ministers…such children, or organisations working with or representing children, as the Secretary of State thinks fit…and such other persons.”

Is it not odd not to mention families or the context in which children live? I would not make this allegation against the Government, but typically it is totalitarian states that try to bypass the context of the family and the parents to speak directly to children. The measure is rather odd. The Minister has tried to say that if we include families, suddenly the Secretary of State would be obliged to consult the whole of the general public, but that is obviously nonsense. The amendment would simply provide that the

“Secretary of State…must consult…such children”,

families

“and organisations working with…children, as the Secretary of State thinks fit”.

We have heard from the Minister, and we will not necessarily hear from her again, unless I have misunderstood the process, but it is a pity she dismissed the proposal. If the Secretary of State does not talk to children in the context of the family, she will not be properly talking to the child. The best advocate of the child is very often the parent. It is not that we do not want to hear directly from children, but if we do not understand the position of the parent as the chief advocate of the child, we misunderstand the essence of the important relationship between the state and children in the context of their family.

Does my hon. Friend also think it a little peculiar and—I hesitate to say this—perhaps typical of a rather bureaucratically minded Government that they are prepared to consult

“organisations working with or representing children”

but not parents themselves?

It is a little peculiar. I am trying to follow my hon. Friend in being charitable, and I do not want to be harsh toward the Government, but I am disappointed.

I would have liked to have heard from the Minister the context in which the consultation will take place. The cheapest and easiest way to consult children who might live in poverty might be to go to a school that serves a poor area and speak to the children there—in other words, entirely removed from the home and family in which the child is being brought up.

With the leave of the House, I will respond to the points made about amendments 35 and 36. I am grateful for the support of the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), and I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) tabled similar amendments in Committee.

In response to the point about children’s commissioners, the Minister did not give a good reason why they should not be included. They have been suggested specifically because their role is statutory and that is why they are different from the others. If we are to go to the trouble of creating through statute an organisation with expertise in being an advocate for children, it should be a statutory consultee. That is only logical, and I suspect that a similar amendment would attract widespread support in the other place for that reason.

The Minister was concerned that amendment 36 would create a burden of consultation—a process burden. If there is a process burden, and if consultation can rightly be described as a burden—I do not think that it can—it was created by signing the UN convention on the rights of the child. Article 12 is clear in requiring states to assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the child’s age and maturity. The Minister made reference to article 12 herself.

Does not the hon. Gentleman think that there is a difference between involving a particular child in a decision that affects them insofar as they understand the issue, for which we have precedent in English law, and the consultation of whole groups of children? I am not suggesting that groups of children should not be consulted—that is a good idea. I simply do not think that the read-across from article 12 is as tight as he suggests, notwithstanding the general principle of children being enabled to participate where possible.

I see the point that the Minister makes. However, the explanatory notes on the duty

“to consult children, or organisations working with or representing children as the Secretary of State thinks fit”

refer to article 12. That implies that that consultation with groups is based on article 12, and that that is not restricted to the right of individual consultation on measures that the state imposes on a child. That may be a debate for another day.

I wish to record my thanks to the Minister for saying that she will look at this point. I do not want to be churlish, but it is a point about process. I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon raised it on 29 October at columns 256-7 in a very good speech and in terms. At that point, she rejected the argument. The Joint Committee then issued its view on 10 November. The point of Report is for the Government to return to the House weeks later with a clear view, and not to see matters leave this House to be dealt with by the unelected House. I do not mean that in an angry way; I just regret that we are not using Report as it should be used. However, I recognise her willingness to reconsider the point, which ought to be put on the record.

Finally, on new clause 4, I accept that there is some validity in the Minister’s point about whether it would tie the Government down to a duty to implement something that might not be the best way of meeting the obligatory targets. The Joint Committee considered and rejected that argument, but we will reflect on her comments and the Government’s response. However, I reject the argument that a legal duty to implement a strategy undermines Parliament’s ability to hold the Government to account. The processes of the House undermine that ability, and I think that any legal reference that Parliament can use will aid it. I do not accept that argument, and nor, I think, will the Joint Committee. It is clearly a difficult new clause, however, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 8

UK strategies

Amendment made: 21, in page 4, line 23, after ‘education’, insert ‘, childcare’.—(Helen Goodman.)

Clause 21

Local child poverty needs assessment

I beg to move amendment 29, in page 13, line 12, after ‘assessment’, insert ‘including—

(i) job creation,

(ii) reducing family breakdown,

(iii) families with disabilities,

(iv) black and minority ethnic children, and

(v) looked after children.’.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: 32, page 13, line 12, at end add

‘which must include the number of households within the area that fail to meet the bedroom standard’.

Amendment 30, page 14, line 38, leave out from ‘of’ to ‘section’ in line 39.

The amendments relate to the duties of local authorities. Under clause 21, which deals with local child poverty needs assessments, the responsible local authorities are required to set out how they will address child poverty. Amendment 29 takes us back partly to an earlier debate, and in the time available I have no intention of running back through the arguments. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) eloquently stated, we believe that there is a lack of balance in the Bill, because it focuses on income targets, which we recognise are necessary, but does not contain enough about the causes of poverty and how we can address them.

To some extent, amendment 29 is another attempt to address the causes of poverty. It would do so in the context of the local child poverty needs assessments. The Government can produce regulations setting out matters that must be considered in such an assessment, and amendment 29 sets out some areas that we think should be included in those regulations, two of which relate to the causes of poverty. In particular, the amendment refers to job creation, which could be a solution and also reduce family breakdown. However, we have had a lengthy debate on those matters, and I have no intention of running back through the arguments.

As I said, we have set out areas that we think should be satisfied by a local needs assessment. For example, it should deal with matters relating to black and minority ethnic children and families with disabilities. On several occasions in Committee we had an interesting debate about issues relating to families with disabilities and the treatment of disability living allowance for the purposes of evaluating a household’s income. Furthermore, assessments should deal with matters relating to looked-after children, which we also debated at length in Committee.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the process of having local authorities working with their partners, other statutory agencies and the voluntary sector to thrash out local child poverty needs assessments using the headings that he has helpfully set out in amendment 29 would be extremely valuable in getting under the skin of what was happening for children in those localities and prove a valuable tool for those authorities and their partners thereafter?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Indeed, there is a recognition of some of those points in the Bill. We have debated such matters in the course of our proceedings on the Bill, but having those points in the Bill would be helpful and would give useful guidance to local authorities.

Given the time and the fact that the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) has already touched on her amendment 32, I will not go into it. However, I would like briefly to say that amendment 30 concerns a matter that we debated in Committee, thanks to a probing amendment from my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell). Amendment 30 relates to the definition of child poverty for the purposes of part 2, which relates to the duties of local authorities. Two issues came up regarding the relative income target in its application to local authorities.

The first issue was about how we measure relative income in a local authority. To be fair, the Minister provided a helpful note about national indicator 116, which stated that it would measure the proportion of children living in families in receipt of out-of-work benefits or working families whose income is below 60 per cent. of median income. That is not exactly the definition in clause 2, so if the Minister has an opportunity, I would be grateful if she could say how significant the difference is between that definition and the definition of relative poverty in clause 2. However, that definition looks pretty close, so to that extent our concern has been addressed.

A second concern is this: what things can local authorities do on the relative income target in clause 2 that are not relevant to those other income targets that clearly belong in the definition of child poverty for the purposes of part 2? The point was made in evidence to us that local authorities do not really have the levers to do anything about the target of 60 per cent. of median income. I can fully understand why that target exists nationally, but if local authorities cannot, as a matter of practice, do anything that is specifically targeted at that income measurement, why have it in the definition of child poverty for the purposes of part 2?

The Government accept that it is right that there should be a different definition of child poverty for part 2 from that for part 1; but if that is so, should we not tailor the definition more, and why should the relative income target be included anyway? We had a debate on that in Committee, but with the greatest of respect to the Minister, I am not sure that we received a clear answer from her. I hope that we will have an opportunity to hear one today, either now or on Third Reading.

Subject to those points, I hope that we will have an opportunity to vote on amendment 29, although I do not intend to push the House to a Division on amendment 30. However, it would be helpful if the Minister could at some point elucidate the Government’s position on those matters.

I want to talk briefly to my amendment 32, which says that when local authorities make assessments of need, they should look specifically at the housing conditions in which children live, given the close link between child welfare and housing, as set out in Every Child Matters. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will address that point in her one-minute winding-up speech.

Rather a lot of points have been made, and I will have difficulty in responding to all of them. On amendment 32, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), I thought that I had made it clear that we were changing the information that would come in through the survey. It would therefore not be sensible to set a target along the lines that she has just described, because there simply is not the information available to do that.

In amendment 29, hon. Members are seeking to prescribe in the Bill matters that we believe would be more appropriately dealt with in regulations—

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

Tackling child poverty and deprivation is one of the most crucial roles for any Government. Our goal is—[Interruption.]

Order. Will hon. Members who are leaving the Chamber please do so as quickly and quietly as possible so that the Third Reading debate can take place?

Our goal is a society where no child’s life is scarred by poverty, and where every child is given the best possible start in life and has the capabilities and opportunities to flourish. Children who grow up in poverty lack many of the experiences and opportunities that others take for granted, and can be exposed to severe hardship and social exclusion. Their childhood suffers as a result, which is unacceptable. In the current difficult economic times, our focus on tackling child poverty is even more important. Too often in the past, recessions and economic downturns have been allowed to affect the lives of children long after the country’s economy has returned to growth.

Today, we set out the five principles that will guide our strategy on child poverty: first, that work is the most sustainable route out of poverty; secondly, that families and family life should be supported; thirdly, that early intervention is necessary to break cycles of deprivation; fourthly, that excellence in public service delivery is key; and fifthly, that cost-effectiveness and affordability are vital.

Worklessness in families and severe deprivation have not been tackled with the energy and drive needed to deal with entrenched disadvantage. In this context, it is right that we renew and strengthen our commitment to deliver on the 2020 goal through the Child Poverty Bill. The Bill will give us renewed impetus to deliver on our goals and to ensure that the right strategies and actions flow from it.

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I would like to make a little more progress.

The Bill will sustain and increase the momentum towards eradicating child poverty, create a clear definition of success, put in place a framework for accountability, and improve partnership-working and collaboration to tackle child poverty at the local level. I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House for their contributions to the debates as the Bill made progress. It has been encouraging that it has received a warm welcome from colleagues.

I want to respond briefly to some of the points that were raised and on which hon. Members asked for the Government’s view. The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) asked about the position of local authorities in respect of relative income. The objective is not to have separate relative income targets for each local authority area. There was some confusion about that in Committee, and I hope we have cleared it up. The hon. Gentleman also suggested that local authorities do not have any impact on relative income standards in their areas. We believe that they do have the ability to influence families’ incomes, and, indeed, play a pivotal role in tackling the causes of relative low income. Also, local authorities will soon have the means to assess local progress in tackling low income, and it is entirely reasonable to expect that to be taken into account in the preparation of their needs assessments.

Local authorities have a number of levers at their disposal to help increase family income. In the short term, they can administer financial help for families on low incomes with measures such as housing and council tax benefit, encouraging families to take up financial support, and joining up national and local partners to provide personalised skills and employment support. Local authorities can also reduce low income in the future by driving economic regeneration and neighbourhood renewal, and by providing high-quality education and early years services.

Aside from its positive reception, the Bill has been a credit to the House. Hon. Members have spoken passionately and been extremely well informed on this crucial topic. The focus that the Government have placed on child poverty has ensured that both the moral and economic case for tackling it is indisputable. They have much to be proud of in their record on child poverty. Our efforts and successes in tackling poverty and deprivation across the country have shown that with the political will those problems can be addressed. However, we need to do more to tackle the root causes and consequences of poverty, so that all children have a good start in life, enjoying a fulfilling childhood and having the capabilities and opportunities to flourish. Our vision is of a fairer society: one in which no child is left behind and every child has the opportunity to flourish.

I have very much enjoyed the debate on this important Bill, not only today, but throughout its Committee stage. Delivering this legislation will take us closer to our goal of eradicating child poverty in this generation. This Bill will help to focus efforts across government, local authorities and other partners to improve the lives of children and young people, and I commend it to the House.

I have no hesitation in joining the Minister in saying that eradicating child poverty is an ambitious but vital objective for our country. It is both an economic imperative, because no advanced economy can afford to waste the potential of so many of its citizens, and, as she has said, a moral imperative, as no decent society should allow so many children to remain in poverty, as has been the case in the United Kingdom in recent years. I shall repeat what my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) said on Second Reading, because we are both proud to serve under a leader who has said:

“I want me—and the government I aspire to lead—to be judged on how we tackle poverty in office. Because poverty is not acceptable in our country today.”

I am also pleased that it was a Conservative Mayor of London who decided to pay a living wage to Greater London authority staff. That had not happened before.

The long title of the Bill refers to “eradication”, but both the Minister and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions have made frequent reference during our debates to the fact that the Government’s real aspiration is to achieve a child poverty level that is among the best in Europe. It would have been slightly more honest to have said that in the Bill, because the 10 per cent. that is in the Bill represents the best level, and 10 per cent. is not eradication. Some 23 per cent. of children in the United Kingdom live in poverty, which is about twice the level found in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark—they have child poverty rates of 14, 12 and 10 per cent. respectively. It is also instructive to note that 23 per cent. of UK children were living in relative poverty in 1987, 24 per cent. were doing so in 1996 and 23 per cent. were doing so in 2001. The level of child poverty has remained stubbornly high for more than 30 years.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has drawn attention to the need for us to change our strategy if we are to make better progress, saying that

“the strategy against poverty and social exclusion pursued since the late 1990s is now largely exhausted.”

The former Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), has said that

“poverty has become more entrenched”.

That is why we need fresh thinking on this subject, and I was pleased that just now the Minister outlined five themes. A number of those relate to the causes of poverty, to which Conservative Members have tried on every occasion to include reference in the Bill.

The Bill is very much a blank canvas. It sets out the targets to be achieved in 2020, but I was disappointed just now that Labour Members voted against including the 2010 target, even though I believe that some of the Minister’s colleagues joined us in the Division Lobby. As I said, the Government have had 10 years to have a run at the target of halving child poverty, and I think that a formal report to Parliament on that would have been useful and would have provided the Government with an early opportunity to come to the House to explain how the child poverty strategy will change.

Conservative Members have set out on a number of occasions the causes of poverty that we want examined. Our non-exhaustive list includes educational failure, hence our school reforms and our commitment to pay a pupil premium to those schools in the most disadvantaged areas, and the level of skills, which is vital. Level 3 skills, which were mentioned at Prime Minister’s questions, are particularly important and have decreased over the past decade.

Both benefit dependency and intergenerational worklessness are huge problems that cause poverty up and down our country, hence the Opposition have produced some of the most detailed welfare reform proposals that any party has introduced in opposition or in government. Our “Get Britain Working” programme cuts right to the heart of what is needed to deal with child poverty, so that we can help people to get back into the work force and break these intergenerational cycles of worklessness.

Work on dealing with benefit dependency is extremely important, too, and I commend the “Dynamic Benefits” report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) in that regard. The issue of debt is extremely serious. We touched on that in Committee. It aggravates poverty for some families in a particularly nasty and unattractive way, trapping them in deep poverty, often for long periods. Some excellent work is being done in the voluntary sector by Christians Against Poverty centres and others up and down the country.

I was pleased to hear the Minister refer to the need to strengthen families, and I was particularly pleased to have support from the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) in that regard, too.

We touched on the issue of addiction. I say again that I think that that needs to be part of the Government’s anti-poverty strategy. I recognise that some people might get into illegal substance abuse and alcohol abuse because of poverty, but the relationship also works the other way around. Families and lives that were proceeding along absolutely fine are destroyed because of alcoholism or illegal drug use.

We have also learned from a recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that the Government’s child poverty strategy started to run into trouble as early as 2004-05. That was a key turning point well before the recession when poverty, unemployment and property repossessions all started to rise. Indeed, only a day or so ago there was an further excellent report by the Young Foundation pointing out some of these difficulties and to the important psycho-social problems faced by many families up and down the country. In particular, it pointed out the vital role of the voluntary sector, working alongside the Government to make real progress in dealing with these deep-seated issues.

In conclusion, I want to thank all those who were on the Committee, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke). He was an excellent shadow Minister to work alongside. I want to pay particular tribute, too, to my hon. Friends the Members for Henley (John Howell) and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart). They were a formidable duo behind us both in Committee and this afternoon. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), who spoke eloquently on Second Reading and made a number of excellent interventions today.

The Bill is not perfect. We will seek in the other place to push some of the issues that we have raised. However, we join the Minister in agreeing with her wish to see child poverty come tumbling down in this country. It is still far too high and we believe that we can make much better progress.

It was interesting that when the Minister began her speech she said that she thought that it was wrong that any child should suffer poverty and deprivation. She was, of course, right. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said that the Bill talked about eradication, and it is regrettable in a sense—one might call it the poverty of our ambition—that we would regard success as 1 million children still living in poverty in 10 years’ time. It might be that in modern industrialised societies that is, in the Government’s view, the best that can be achieved. Clearly, it would be an awful lot better than the point from which we are starting. To that extent, we welcome the Bill. It is sad that the Government have felt it necessary to oversell it: the Prime Minister routinely at Prime Minister’s questions refers to the Government’s goal in legislation as being eradication, but he never qualifies that with the odd million who will still be left. That is really rather unhelpful.

It is true that the Bill raises the political price of failing to tackle child poverty, but no Government can bind their successor. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) asked what would happen if we were at war in 2018. If that happened, no doubt we would repeal or amend the Act because we would have to spend money because we were at war. We realise that there are always get-outs to such things, but the Bill will make it more difficult, in a relatively normal period, for a Government not to prioritise tackling child poverty.

Does the hon. Gentleman have any misgivings about the Bill? Obviously, no one wants child poverty to be maintained, but if we do not make an assessment of a Government’s overall social priorities, how can we come up with statutory targets for one particular area? Surely that creates a risk, outside of the calamity of major war, that we will prioritise child poverty when it would be better to prioritise something else because of the situation at that time. Is not the Bill more declaratory than proper in its structure?

In a sense, the hon. Gentleman is clearly right—the Bill prioritises the tackling of child poverty, and he is perfectly entitled to take the view either that it should not be a priority or that we should not presume that it should be a priority. However, I refer him to the situation in the 1980s, when tackling child poverty was neither a priority nor a statutory priority.

Rather shockingly, the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire selectively started his history from 1987. He has done that before, but the first time he did so, I thought that it was done innocently; this time, I assume that it was done deliberately. It is worth remembering that the Conservatives started government with 1.7 million children in poverty and that that number rose to 2.8 million under them, so, at the point at which he started his figures, the Tories had already put 1 million children into poverty. He then glossed over the fact that another 500,000 children moved into poverty before the Tories left office. They therefore doubled child poverty. I do not doubt the personal sincerity of the hon. Gentleman one jot, but the idea that the Conservative party is the answer to child poverty is amazing.

The hon. Gentleman and I had a similar exchange on Second Reading, so we are going over slightly old ground. I have the HBAI figures in front of me—I am sure that he, too, has them—and I see from table 4.1 on page 72 that the highest point was in 1995, at 29 per cent. However, my point is that these problems have been around for a considerable period. The rate in 1987 was the same as it is today. We have not made the progress that one would have hoped, despite the Government having made child poverty a political priority, because we are only back at the level that we were at in 1987, hence the need for fresh thinking.

The House might have thought that the hon. Gentleman was making a slightly different point—that it has all been pretty flat for 20 years, and that this is all terribly difficult. In fact, he picked a point halfway up a hill—a hill for which the Conservative party was responsible—because the figures continued to rise after his starting point. The achievements of the Labour Government might not have gone far enough, but they peaked the figures at the top of the hill and started us back down it again, and we are now halfway back down the hill that he started halfway up. The situation has not been static; a long-term trend of grotesque inequality, which his party presided over with apparent equanimity, has been reversed.

I hate to take up too much of Third Reading on economic history, but will the hon. Gentleman cast his mind back to the economy that the Conservative party inherited in 1979? It was a shambles and the priority had to be economic growth and regeneration. We were the sick man of Europe and we inherited a shambles. It is not possible for every Government to make progress on both economic and social targets if they inherit an economy that is in total shambles. It is worth putting that on the record.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that. Clearly, 18 years is not long enough to avoid doubling child poverty. I assume, therefore, that he is saying that if the Conservatives came to office now, in what they say is a very difficult economic situation, and if child poverty were to double over the next 18 years, that would just be the way things are.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it seems eccentric to think that a Conservative policy could assist in dealing with child poverty, given that it might mean that a man who is on his third wife would still get extra benefits from their marriage allowance, while his first wife, who might still be looking after their children as a lone parent, would be being discriminated against and have an allowance taken away?

The hon. Lady raises a point about the perversity of the proposal to reward marriage through the tax system. The Conservatives started the abolition of the married couples tax allowance, but she may recall that Labour finished it off. It is funny how things come around again.

However, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure that you would not want me to stray from the Bill, which I welcome. It does not do a huge amount, but it does raise the political cost of not taking child poverty seriously, and that has to be a good thing. It will also engage local government, and we valued the contributions that the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) made in Committee with his proactive thinking about child poverty at local level. That may well turn out to be one of the Bill’s more concrete implications, as the national statistics will not be available locally anyway in quite that form.

As many hon. Members have said, we had a good Committee stage, and I was grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) for his support. It was also good that two Government amendments—on child care, and the research function of the child poverty commission—were tabled on Report in response to the points that we raised. It is a welcome—and for me a relatively novel experience—to find that the arguments that we made in Committee actually changed something. To that extent, it has been a productive process but I am sure, as the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire said, that our noble Friends in another place will still have some items left on their agenda. However, I certainly encourage my hon. Friends to support the Third Reading of the Bill tonight.

I do not know whether it is usual to have so many Back Benchers wanting to take part in a Third Reading debate, but it is perfectly appropriate for this Bill. In Committee, those on both Front Benches commented on the way that Back Benchers had contributed, and that included the amendments that we tabled. For myself, I have very much enjoyed participating in the proceedings on this Bill, as it is an extremely important subject that is very close to my heart. Child poverty is something that we really need to make progress on.

Having said that, I remain disappointed with many aspects of the Bill, given that this is such an important subject. I remain disappointed with the way that it is still ill thought through in terms of the targets that it sets and the way that it is tackling—or not tackling—the causes of poverty. We have heard a lot about both matters again this afternoon on Report.

I also think that the Bill’s structure remains ill thought through, and I still find it difficult to reconcile what it is trying to achieve in part 1 with what it is trying to achieve in part 2. Another matter that was raised in Committee but not on Report is the possibility, as many of the charity representatives who came to the Committee as witnesses stated clearly, that the Government will be taken to judicial review over the non-achievement of targets. That is still the case, as is the potential, given that these are income targets, that judges rather than the Chancellor of the Exchequer will make economic policy—although, after today’s pre-Budget report, perhaps judges could not do a worse job.

My hon. Friend is right to point to the absurd idea that judges might intervene in the complex area of child poverty—perhaps they will demand that billions be given in additional tax credits—but does he agree that there is also the equally absurd possibility of a conflict between statutory obligations? No Government before this one had ever put targets in statute, but now there will be statutes pointing in different directions. For example, whereas the Fiscal Responsibility Bill suggests that there must be cuts, other legislation such as the Climate Act 2008 and this Bill suggest that more should be spent.

Order. We are discussing the Third Reading of the Child Poverty Bill and not the other legislation that the hon. Gentleman has referred to.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is always good to take an intervention from the other half of the duo, who will no doubt make a contribution of his own in a moment. However, my hon. Friend is quite right to point out that that is also one of the legal consequences of the Bill, and I too think that it is an insult to Parliament as well.

I am also disappointed with the way that the Government continue to treat local government. It is clear from the Bill that they do not take local authorities seriously as entities in themselves, with their own agenda and ability to deliver, but regard them as the delivery arm of Whitehall.

Today is not the end of the matter with this Bill, as there is a huge pile of regulation and, even more worryingly, guidance to be issued to local authorities. All I shall ask of the Minister today is that she please take note of the evidence sessions and the comments made by witnesses. What is required from the Government when it comes to regulation and guidance is a light touch, if any touch at all. Many local authorities are already doing a good job in respect of child poverty, as was illustrated by the evidence to the Committee from Kent and Liverpool in particular. So please let us see in the guidance a recognition of the best practice that already exists.

I asked one of the witnesses what difference the Bill would make and whether it would make a big impact, because one of them had said that something pretty big needed to happen in the field of child poverty. I asked:

“Is that something going to happen as a result of the delivery mechanisms set out in the Bill?”

Neil O’Brien from Policy Exchange answered that negatively in terms of the delivery mechanisms and the aims in the Bill. It is interesting to read what he said next:

“you are not going to be voting in this place on the strategy and all of those things”—

the big picture things—

“you are voting on just a target that is very much focused on central Government and everything they are doing. So, in answer to your previous question, there is a complete mismatch.”––[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 110, Q21.]

That is a great shame.

The Bill could have shown greater ambition and taken us a lot further down the road towards eradicating child poverty. Instead, we have had the perversion of the English language, whereby “eradication” no longer means eradication in the sense that the rest of us would use the word. I hope that, with a change of Government, we will get a strategy for child poverty that is much more focused on delivering real change for children and particularly the families in which they live.

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate on Third Reading. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), I have enjoyed being involved in the proceedings on the Bill. The Committee that considered the Bill had the involvement of hon. Members from across the House. That is not always true. Government Back Benchers in particular sometimes seem to spend their entire time writing correspondence. That was not the case in this Committee, and every hon. Member took a deep interest in the issue and brought their own skills to it. Labour Members brought to the Committee casework and an understanding of housing needs in their constituencies. The Front Benchers of all three parties also played a full part in the Committee, which was productive, so it was a pleasure and a privilege to be part of it.

The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) mentioned in his address that he hoped the Bill would make it harder and put up the political price for any Government in future to fail to tackle child poverty. He then launched a rather partisan assault.

It was puerile.

Puerile, was it? The hon. Member for Northavon then launched an assault on the Conservative Government, who did indeed inherit a basket-case economy in 1979.

Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are debating the Bill on Third Reading, and should therefore be debating the Bill’s contents.

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was trying to answer the points made from his Front Bench by the hon. Member for Northavon. I do not know whether his status is different from mine, but the likelihood of meeting the targets in the Bill is based on an assessment of prior performance. In 1997, when the last Conservative Government came in, we were in a similar position. Okay, the fiscal deficit at its peak in 1976, when the International Monetary Fund came in, was half what it is today, so we are in a worse position from which to make change. Under that Conservative Government, who restarted the British economy, child poverty increased in a way that is regrettable. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) is nodding his head.

Despite the wreckage that is being left of our economy—again, by a Labour Government—if a Conservative Government are elected this coming May, we aim to ensure that we do not just revive the economy while leaving behind children in poverty. That is precisely why my hon. Friends are determined to take the child poverty issue seriously. We accept the fact that the record on child poverty was not great under the last Conservative Government. We aim to do better, but none of us progresses policy development in that area if we just try to make cheap partisan remarks or to suggest that anyone at any time—Ministers in the 1980s any more than today—were indifferent to the welfare of children. They were trying to focus on turning the country around, from a sick of man of Europe and an economic basket case to a dynamo that could move forward. Of course, this Government inherited that position in 1997.

Order. Could I remind the hon. Member that we are not repeating a Second Reading debate? I have given him some latitude, and I would now ask him to concentrate his remarks on the Third Reading of this particular Bill.

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I am grateful also to my hon. Friend, who intervenes conveniently.

My hon. Friend is making his point powerfully, as usual, but I have been sitting here listening to the debate and I must say that one way to reduce child poverty is surely to encourage marriage and for children to be born into families where the parents are married, because they stay together longer. It seems as though the two other main parties in the House are opposed to the idea of encouraging marriage.

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. He was not here during the earlier debate, when I reminded the House of what the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who is on the Front Bench today, told the Public Bill Committee. She said:

“The Government are not wholly convinced that family breakdown is a cause of poverty”.––[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2009; c. 15, Q44.]

That is an extraordinary thing for a Minister in this Labour Government to say. They are turning themselves away from all the evidence. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire intervened on me earlier to read out the latest set of statistics, provided by the Minister’s own Department, which show that a child brought up in a single-parent family is twice as likely as a child in a two-parent family to be in poverty. So my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is absolutely right.

We have a Government who, for their own narrow ideological or political dividing-lines reasons, insist on turning their face against a fundamental aspect of tackling poverty, which is to restore families and help couples—not necessarily married—to stay together to support their children. We know that if we can help to maintain that situation, general outcomes are much better. There is less likelihood of children being in poverty, and there is less likelihood of other unpleasant after-effects in later life, whether they involve mental health, educational outcomes or the likelihood of unemployment.

The essence of what comes out of the Bill will be the strategies that local authorities and the Secretary of State come up with, but it is most important that we tackle the causes of poverty. The Minister normally tries to be honest, and she talked about this piece of legislation—this Bill—ensuring that Governments have to be held to account and take action on child poverty. But, disappointingly, what did she do in her opening speech? Not once did she mention the 2010 target that this Government set, with a solemn promise that we would see child poverty halved. She did not even mention it, and we can only take politicians seriously on matters such as tackling poverty if they face up to their record to date. [Interruption.] I think the hon. Member for Northavon wants to intervene again.

There has been some progress, but the Government have not moved to tackle child poverty. Of course the irony is that, here we are, with this Child Poverty Bill and the Government congratulating themselves on introducing it, yet today, in the pre-Budget report, the door has finally been slammed in the faces of those who hoped—

Order. May I remind the hon. Member that there will no doubt be an opportunity to discuss the pre-Budget report, but that now it is the Third Reading of the Bill?

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is pre-Budget reports and future Budgets that will need to put in place the relevant measures, if child poverty and, indeed, the long-term roots of poverty are to be tackled.

The Government talk a good game about the involvement of local government in the eradication of poverty, and they talk about initiatives such as Total Place, whereby they involve Departments across the piece in the support of local government. However, is it not true that the one Department that will not devolve power and responsibility for funding to Total Place and, I suggest, to the eradication of poverty is the centralised Department for Work and Pensions? The Treasury and other Departments support Total Place, but the Department for Work and Pensions fails to do so.

rose—

Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not going to be tempted to stray into a very different debate from the one that we are currently dealing with.

I am extremely mindful of your strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will return to the strategies.

We know very little about the strategies. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire tabled amendments to try to ensure that issues such as family breakdown and looked-after children would be covered in the Bill so that local authorities and, indeed, the Secretary of State dealt with them properly. It is in the strategies that we find the detail of whether we can come up with a way of genuinely tackling, let alone eradicating, child poverty.

Can the hon. Gentleman assure the House that if we do have a Conservative Government in a matter of months, child poverty will be a key priority for that Government?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. In the light of what happened with child poverty under the last Conservative Government, I welcome the opportunity to say that it absolutely will be a priority. The leader of the Conservative party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), has said that the eradication of poverty is a major priority and that it is how a Conservative Government would wish to be measured. Statisticians of the talent and skill of the hon. Member for Northavon will be able to remind my right hon. Friend, and indeed me, of that undertaking. We are pledged to tackle poverty, and we want to do so in the most joined-up way possible.

Order. I understand that the hon. Gentleman is again responding to an intervention, but may I remind him that we are debating the Third Reading of this Bill, not any future Bill?

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Of course, it will be under the auspices of this Bill that any future Conservative Government would have to address child poverty—it will be the lens through which they look at it—so talking about what they would do is what the debate on this Bill is about. Unless it is repealed, it will determine and set a framework in which future Governments will have to deal with this important issue.

I have been listening to the debate with growing concern—I was here when my hon. Friend made his original speech—and I am beginning to wonder whether I should vote against the Bill. Could he summarise the reasons why I should or should not do so?

If, like me, my hon. Friend does not like declaratory legislation, and does not think that targets should be set in law because they are a meaningless fraud on the British people, he may well not support the Bill. On the other hand, he may accept, as Conservative Front Benchers do, that this framework provides a driver whereby future Governments can show their intent to tackle child poverty. Given the difficulties with increases in child poverty in the past, it is tremendously important that we show the seriousness of intent of Conservative Members who wish and hope to be in government shortly; we must make absolutely clear our commitment to the eradication of child poverty. That is why, although I understand some of the questions about process that my hon. Friend no doubt has, I will not vote against the Bill. We need to show that there is consensus across the House that child poverty is wrong and we no longer want to see it. Through the details of the strategies that are produced in future, I hope and expect by a Conservative Secretary of State, we will be able to work away on the root causes of poverty and ensure that they are tackled.

I want briefly to mention an amendment dealing with rural poverty, which I tabled, unsuccessfully, in Committee. I appeal to Ministers, while we have them here, and before they go away to produce national strategies in addition to the local strategies produced by local authorities, to bear in mind the peculiarities of rural poverty. According to the Commission for Rural Communities, 22 per cent. of rural children and their families are in financial poverty. There are extra costs to living in rural areas. For example, households in rural settlements spend £74.50 on transport each week compared with £57.10 by those in urban areas. That is serious money coming out of income that might be thought to be in the hands of that family, making it better off than an urban family, but in fact they have to spend it on transport. I hope that Ministers will examine carefully the peculiarities of poverty in rural areas.

Like others, I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and the Centre for Social Justice on their work. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State is in her place, because I wish to say that one of the most exciting programmes that the next Conservative Government, if that is what we have, could undertake would be to follow on from the “Dynamic Benefits” report and consider the barriers preventing those who are currently living in poverty from escaping it and getting into work. We need to understand the incentives that affect those on low income with the same precision with which we seek to understand the incentives for the rich, where they may move and what tax they pay. We need to ensure that for people who are not in work, getting back into work pays and they do not find themselves worse off by trying to do the right thing. I do not know the detail of the measure that was announced in today’s pre-Budget report, but if it is a response to that problem and intended to ensure that those who are not in work are definitely rewarded for getting into work, I will congratulate the Government on it. I hope that it is a reality and not just a pretence.

I thank the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) for leaving me approximately four minutes to make my comments.

We are agreed that we need to tackle income inequality. There has been much mention of the root causes of poverty, and we agree that we need to tackle them. I was not convinced by the Conservative argument that we should widen the Bill ever further to take everything into account, but income is clearly key. It is worth reminding ourselves of the explanatory notes to the Bill, some of which were extremely good. For example, they state:

“It is nearly impossible to quantify the financial benefits of eradicating child poverty. Growing up in poverty can damage cognitive, social and emotional development, which are all determinants of future outcomes for a child. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that child poverty costs at least £25 billion a year in Britain, and that £17 billion could accrue to the Exchequer if child poverty were eradicated. However, this is a possible under-estimate of the true benefit. There are other benefits associated with the eradication of child poverty which are difficult to quantify such as equity, reducing hardship, deprivation and exclusion and breaking the intergenerational poverty link.”

I think we all agree on that.

The Child Poverty Action Group and others have said that we have to put serious extra resources into tackling child poverty. They have mentioned a figure of some £3 billion, and the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who has spoken ably today, mentioned a figure of £4 billion to £5 billion. That is the kind of sum that we would have needed from the Government if they were really serious. Without real money, I cannot see how child poverty targets can possibly be met. I know that we are not supposed to venture into the pre-Budget report, but it seems to have done very little to help.

There are other factors to consider, such as the fact that when people’s work is cut to less than 16 hours, they lose tax credits, as well as the particular problem of single-parent families. In my constituency, there is a real problem of some kids being able to afford to go on a school trip whereas others in the same class cannot. The main issue brought to me is housing problems, and I see many youngsters being brought up in seriously overcrowded accommodation.

I agree with those who have said that less than 10 per cent. of children in relative poverty is a pretty poor target to aim at. Is it ambitious enough? It is certainly not eradication.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is the major failing of the Bill? It has redefined the word “eradicate”. Eradicating poverty means to wipe it out, and the target is not to wipe it out.

Absolutely. It makes a complete joke of the word.

There are other concerns. The Committee discussed whether clause 15 will be a get-out clause for the Government in future. We clearly have to set priorities for the time we are living in. I might as well mention Trident again, because that seems to be more of a priority for the Government than eradicating child poverty. There is not time to talk about many other things, but I emphasise that the minimum wage is far too low. We need it to be a living wage, and there is some good work being done on that in London, Glasgow and elsewhere. I want the Government to be a bit stronger on that, because it would surely go a huge way towards eradicating child poverty.

Finally, I appeal to the Government to work with the Scottish authorities in taking these matters forward. Westminster clearly needs to take—