11. If he will amend his proposed welfare reforms to minimise the risk of children entering poverty. (82831)

The overhaul of the benefits system through the Welfare Reform Bill will hugely improve the incentives to work. Universal credit will bring in an improvement for children, in that 350,000 children will be lifted out of relative poverty. As the hon. Lady may be aware, we have also made available an extra £300 million for the poorest people who are caring for children.

The Children’s Society’s analysis of the impact of the welfare reforms says that they will push more children into severe poverty and homelessness. Currently, one in four children in my constituency is in severe poverty. Eighteen bishops have called for the Secretary of State to reconsider his position on the reforms—will he listen to them?

I think the hon. Lady is referring to the cap, but I do not agree with her. The cap, which I understand Labour Front Benchers support, is rational and reasonable in that nobody who is out of work should be earning more than average earnings—that is, about £26,000 net. She may deal with constituents who have to travel perhaps an hour into work in the morning and an hour back, who work very hard and who look at those who are out of work and on benefits and find it difficult to accept that they are unable to earn as much.

With child poverty targets repeatedly missed pre-2010, what role does the Government’s support for child care and the extension of early years provision play in helping families and keeping children out of poverty?

My hon. Friend has hit the issue right on the head. If we focus narrowly on income, we get a perverse result. Through our early years work, through the support provided by the pupil premium in schools, and through the work that we are doing with universal credit, we have been hugely improving future outcomes for parents and their children who currently languish in poverty.

As the Secretary of State will know, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that by 2015 there will be 400,000 more children in poverty. Does he agree with us about this, and if so, what is he going to do about it—or does he just accept that it is a necessary evil of the Government’s current policies?

With respect, we are already doing a lot about it. Of course, people can predict as far ahead as they like, without making big assumptions that nothing ever changes, and they will get the kind of results that they want. The reality for us is that all the work that I described to my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) is vital in changing outcomes for parents and children. Unlike Labour when in government, we do not think that children should be considered separately from their families; we lift families out of poverty and children out of poverty too.

A genuine challenge for us is to move into work those young unemployed people who have not had the role model of a parent getting up and going out to work in the morning. Can my right hon. Friend assure us that we are tackling this cycle of dependency to assist children and young people for the future?

I refer my hon. Friend to the answer given earlier by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State. The Work programme is a huge change for people who have been out of work for a long time. If we couple that with work experience and the opportunities for apprenticeships, we can see that this is a big step forward. Together with the introduction of universal credit, which will ensure that someone is always better off in work than out of work, the whole benefit and welfare system should be changed positively to support those sorts of people.