I beg to move amendment 77, in clause 4, page 4, line 33, after paragraph (b) insert—

“(ba) children living in low income working households.”

To require the Secretary of State to include data on children living in low income working households in their report on the life chances of children.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 78, in clause 4, page 4, line 35, leave out “4” and insert “1, 2, 3 and 4”.

To require the Secretary of State to include data on the educational attainment of children at Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 rather than only at Key Stage 4.

Amendment 79, in clause 4, page 4, line 37, leave out “4” and insert “1, 2, 3 and 4”.

To require the Secretary of State to include data on the educational attainment of disadvantaged children at Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 rather than only at Key Stage 4.

Amendment 80, in clause 4, page 4, line 37, after paragraph (d) insert—

“(e) key health indicators for children in England;

(f) key health indicators for disadvantaged children in England.”.

To require the Secretary of State to include key health indicators in their report on the life chances of children.

Amendment 81, in clause 4, page 5, line 3, after paragraph (f) insert—

“(g) low income”.

A consequential amendment to amendment 77.

Amendment 82, in clause 4, page 5, line 3, after paragraph (f) insert—

“(g) key health indicators”.

A consequential amendment to amendment 80.

Good morning, Mr Owen. It is nice to see you in the Chair and to return to the Committee for, I am afraid, my last appearance in what has been a very enjoyable Committee.

Amendment 77 would require the Secretary of State to include, in the reports that the Bill envisages, data on children living in low-income working households as part of the reporting on their life chances. We all know the damage that poverty does to children’s life chances and to their outcomes in the short and longer term. Poverty is correlated with poor health, poor educational outcomes and poor employment outcomes in adulthood. It is extremely damaging not only to the individuals who experience it, but to the whole country. The amendment is an important one in recognition of the high incidence of poverty in working households. Currently, the Bill only requires reporting on households that are out of work. Therefore, it is important to have a report on the impact that poverty could have on the life chances of children growing up in those working families.

The Government are fond of saying that work is the best route out of poverty. I absolutely agree that it should be, but while families in work do face a lower risk of poverty than those out of work, and the more work people can do and the more hours they can supply the lower the risk, two thirds of children growing up in poverty are in working households. The Government refuse to engage with that fact and the Bill, in failing to address it, continues that situation. Indeed, I would say that the Government are making the situation worse.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the measures we passed in the House on Tuesday on tax credits will take £3.4 billion annually from low-income families by 2020. Between those measures, the measures in the Bill and other measures in the summer Budget, we will see work incentives damaged. We have to be concerned, as a result, about the impact on in-work poverty. The changes that the House passed on Tuesday will come into force in April next year and will lower the level at which working tax credits start to be withdrawn from £6,420 to £3,850. They will also increase the taper rate at which tax credits are withdrawn from 41% to 48%, meaning that, for every £1 earned over the threshold, there will be a 48p reduction in the level of tax credit entitlement. As a consequence of those changes to working tax credit, the level at which child tax credit begins to be taken away is lowered from £16,105 to £12,125.

Although Labour welcomes the increase in the personal tax allowance and the introduction of the so-called national living wage, the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group has stated that any gains from those measures will not negate the impact of those tax credit cuts from April 2016. The IFS recently concluded that families will lose more than £1,000 a year on average from cuts to tax credits, while they will gain between £100 and £200 a year at most from the proposed national living wage. I recognise that some families will benefit from increased free childcare, but many still use informal care and many will still be left with a funding shortfall for childcare, even under the increased and more generous provisions in universal credit and in relation to older children.

The benefits freeze provisions in the Bill, and the provisions of the cap, will apply to both out-of-work and in-work benefits. We will expand on our concerns about those measures later, but we should be concerned about them given their impact on children growing up in working households. We are particularly worried about the freeze in housing benefit. Many working families rely on housing benefit, and the explosion in housing benefit in recent years is in no small measure due to the increased bill for those families. The way in which the Bill will create a disconnect between rents and housing benefit causes us real concern, especially in high-demand areas such as those represented by my hon. Friends the Members for Islington South and Finsbury and for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, where private rents have shown no sign of falling—rather the reverse, I expect. Our concern is shared widely outside the Committee, as we heard from our witnesses in the oral evidence sessions.

I am concerned, too, about the impact of the freeze and the benefits cap on children in working families. Child tax credit and especially child benefit are a platform that help to improve the gains from paid work. Both will be frozen for four years under the Bill. Working families with children will be hit hard, but the impact will be different for different kinds of households. In that respect, it is interesting to look at the recently published research of Donald Hirsch for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on minimum income standards. I recognise that that is not exactly the same as poverty, or child poverty, but the research gives some interesting and helpful information about how the measures in the Bill and in the summer Budget will impact on family households differently depending on size, structure and family make-up. The figures show that lone parents and large families will be the biggest losers.

A lone parent with one child, working full time on the minimum wage, was typically just short of the minimum income standard in 2010—that lone parent would have reached 97% of the objective minimum income standard through a combination of earnings, tax credits and benefits. By 2020 the shortfall will grow to between a quarter and a third—around 71%, according to the JRF research. That is for lone parents in full-time work, but many lone parents are forced to work part time because of difficulties in finding childcare, so they will benefit less from the planned rise in the national living wage as they will not be able to supply so many hours of work. The position of lone parents has also been worsened by the rising incidence of sanctions, and many families with young children have been hit as a result.

The picture for low-income working families is complex, hit by forces of opposing, but not necessarily oppositely and equally neutralising, effects. Such families require complex policy responses, but the Government’s measures in the Bill and the summer Budget are certainly not complex or subtle, and they do not even show awareness of how the problems compound one another. It is important that we focus on how the measures impact on low-income working families and the children in those families, since we share with the Government the ambition that work should be a route out of poverty for those families and that work should always pay. Today it does not.

Working families and children in those families are suffering hardship and will suffer more hardship. It is disgraceful that the Government have created such a situation. It is notable that some Government Members were deeply concerned about the matter on Tuesday, when we debated the tax credits measures. We cannot undo any of those measures today under the clause that we are debating, but we can shine a spotlight and require a proper report on the effect on working households. That is what amendment 77 seeks to achieve.

Amendment 78 would require the report to include data on the educational attainment of children not only at key stage 4, as currently proposed in the Bill, but at key stages 1, 2 and 3. I hope the Minister will be able to explain the Government’s rationale for looking only at key stage 4. That is when a child is aged 16, which is late in their development—am I right? No doubt someone will intervene to correct me if I am wrong. Perhaps not colleagues from the Scottish National party, because I appreciate that the situation is different in Scotland. The clause would not affect the constituents of the hon. Member for Livingston. In passing, I note that when we debated the Bill on Tuesday, I pointed out that it would present an interesting little case study on English votes for English laws. Here is an example before us.

It is late in a child’s development to look at indicators only at key stage 4. I hope the Minister will be able to explain the rationale for that approach. I had hoped there might be room for some cross-party consensus on the importance of child development at a much younger age.

I suppose a cynic might say—I do not know whether this is right—that if there were to be a major change to child poverty, for instance that it got much worse, and we were to measure it by looking at educational attainment at key stage 4, it would give the Government many years’ grace while children adversely impacted by poverty were going through the system. We would not know how bad it was until they were 16, even if we were to assume that educational attainment at key stage 4 were sufficient to measure child poverty.

That is a very depressing thought, but quite possibly a fair one. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response. I do not think it is right in any circumstances to wait to measure the impact on children until they are 16. We know that the early years are a crucial developmental period. Action for Children, in written evidence, told us that

“the rapid brain development in the first two years of a child’s life provides the foundations for their future health and wellbeing”

and their development. Development in the early years is strongly associated with positive outcomes in later life.

Development in cognitive ability in the early years is highly predictive of subsequent achievement, with a strong relationship to educational success at school and income at age 30. By school age there are already wide variations in children’s abilities, which widen throughout childhood. The gap in attainment between the poorest children and children from better-off households, already large at age five, grows particularly quickly during the primary school years.

That points to the importance of measuring at key stages 1 and 2. Children from low-income backgrounds achieve poorer development by age five than their more affluent peers. The latest statistics from the Department for Education show that less than half— 45%—of pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a good level of development. Those children are falling behind before they start school, and the position worsens after they start school.

Closing the ability gap at age five enables children to do better later on in school. Those who arrive in the bottom range of ability tend to stay there. More than half—55%— of children in the bottom 20% of attainment at age seven, key stage 1, are still there at age 16, key stage 4. By measuring, reporting and taking action at key stage 1 would be able to tell a much better story when reporting at key stage 4, instead of waiting for the disasters to pile up.

I am listening with care to my hon. Friend’s important speech about this vital subject. She has just touched upon the impact of cold homes on children’s respiratory health. Is it her experience that people come to her surgery who live not only in cold homes, but in damp ones? Damp homes have an effect on the incidence of children’s asthma and a number of skin conditions, particularly when children’s clothes are rotten because they are put in storage against a damp wall, carpets rot, there is insufficient air going through a property and there is overcrowding.

That is absolutely right. Many constituents come to my surgery particularly distressed by damp in their homes. For many parents, it is the visible manifestation of their fears for their children’s health when they live in inadequate housing. In my experience, landlords are often very reluctant—in fact, extremely hostile—to do anything about problems reported to them by low-income families.

Is it my hon. Friend’s experience that landlords—including social landlords—will go in, wash the walls that are black and tell the family that they do not have their windows open sufficiently, and when the blackness comes back the family are told that it is somehow or other their fault? Does she have the same experience as me with house-proud women coming to her surgery, saying, “I wash the walls down once a month and the blackness still comes back. I keep the windows open as they tell me to, but we are so overcrowded that this is the reason for the dampness”?

I share exactly the experience in my Manchester constituency that my hon. Friend experiences in her inner London constituency. She, like me, may have parents coming to her saying that they have been told by their landlords that they should not hang up damp washing, but they do not have gardens, so where are they meant to put it to dry? They cannot afford to run tumble driers because the electricity bills would simply be beyond their reach. The cocktail of problems that mothers in poor housing have to cope with on behalf of their families is really quite distressing. I am sure that hon. Members all around the Committee will have had similar cases in their surgeries. There is a real concern about housing quality and its impact on child heath.

Inadequate incomes also compound food poverty, meaning that low-income groups consume less protein, iron, fresh fruits and vegetables, vitamin C, fish, oily fish and folate. Women who are seeking to conceive and pregnant women worry about what will happen to their unborn babies and children as they grow up. Inadequate diets are extremely concerning when we look at children’s health and wellbeing, and are a significant consequence of low household income.

I speak from my own experience when I lived in the east end on the Lansbury estate. The local shops did not have fresh fruit and vegetables because, largely, the people living in the area were poor and could not afford to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, so the shops did not stock them. In the end, the local authority subsidised the shops to produce fresh fruit and vegetables, but they sat on the shelves and rotted.

What is very interesting, as well as distressing, about what my hon. Friend said is that, when we have data, we can begin to think about solutions. We can see that the problem is a lack of access to fruit and vegetables and, perhaps, a lack of confidence among parents about how to cook or use them. Perhaps there is a lack of income or good-quality transport to go to buy better-quality food.

Earlier this week we debated how important it is to have local strategies in relation to children’s poverty and life chances. What we have just heard from my hon. Friend shows how useful those local strategies can be in looking at the data, identifying the problems and creating solutions to address them. In relation to child health and its connection to poverty, having a national report and, indeed, the lower-level local strategies and reports, would be extremely helpful to improving children’s health outcomes.

Children born into poverty suffer an increased risk of mortality in the first year of their lives and in adulthood. They are more likely to be born early and small, with low birth weight, and they face more health problems in later life. Preventing low birth weight should be an absolute priority for public health officials, but efforts to achieve that will be hampered if parents have insufficient income.

If children’s life chances are to be fully considered, it should be recognised that life chances begin in the womb, even before birth.

Sixteen.

And certainly not as late as 16, as my hon. Friend suggests.

There is a real correlation between poverty—particularly household debt—and the likelihood of mental disorders, including sleep deprivation, depression and anxiety, among new mothers. The effects of poverty are particularly evident among women. Indeed, I have often said that poverty is a gender issue—that women face much of the pain and hold much of the responsibility for coping with poverty in low-income households. Debt and lack of access to income are therefore particularly damaging for a mother’s health.

That means that women are often the shock absorbers of family poverty, reducing their own consumption to ensure that other family members, and particularly their children, are provided for. Even so, it is not in a child’s interests to have a mother whose health is compromised. Naturally, a mother’s instinct will be to put her child first, but the child obviously also has an interest in having a healthy mother. Household incomes are therefore important in the round.

Maternal depression as a result of poverty is itself a significant risk factor in poorer social and emotional development in children. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to start primary school with lower personal, social and emotional development, and they are at significantly increased risk of developing conduct disorders, all of which can lead to difficulties with educational attainment, relationships and mental health throughout their lives.

There has not been much research into the impacts of adding or removing money, but, overall, the correlation between economic pressures and health is a serious concern. Children in low-income families miss out on a whole range of the conditions needed for a good-quality childhood, good psychological and physical wellbeing, and good opportunities and life chances in later life.

Amendment 80 is important in focusing action on the consequences and causes of poverty in terms of health. Monitoring and reporting will also enable the Government to make the most of the substantial investment they make in the nation’s health. It will enable us to make a more effective assessment of the impact of health spending on child development and the impact of parental awareness and education—for example, in relation to diet, breastfeeding or smoking cessation—on children’s health. It will also give us an opportunity to look at and focus local health and wellbeing strategies in the interests of improving child health. That would not cost any money, but it would lead to much clearer accountability. I commend amendment 80 to the Committee.

The other amendments are consequential on the substantive amendments in the group, so I will not speak to them. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to address the Committee on these really important amendments. We all know that the poorest children suffer the worst outcomes, and reporting on their poverty and the individual outcomes they experience is therefore the right way to get a rounded picture of child poverty and life chances, as well as of the causes and consequences involved. It will also help us to take action to introduce the strategies to address the disadvantage that poor children face.

Good morning, Mr Owen. I thank the hon. Lady for her thoughtful contribution. She said this would be her last sitting, so I would like to thank her for her previous contributions. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] During my short tenure in this role, working alongside her on welfare issues, she has been a valued colleague.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Owen. I have a couple of questions for the Minister. She dismisses the statements of the majority of witnesses who gave evidence about the importance of the income measure. What message does she think the Government are sending to those witnesses who made a robust case for ensuring that income was retained within the measurements? The professor from Bristol University made powerful point about the UK’s international standing on this issue.

Will the Minister also address the specific point about only measuring at age 16? If a 16-year-old is the target for the initial measure, they will have spent the majority of their life under a Labour Government.

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is timely, because I am about to come on to some of those points.

Income-based poverty measures focus only on the symptoms of child poverty while failing to tackle the root causes. Amendment 77 would take us back to when legislation pushed the Government to get families over an arbitrary income line.

Amendment 77 does not only specify the measuring of income. It mentions “working households”. That is what we are particularly concerned about.

I recognise that, but I am going to carry on and address some of the points that have been made.

Removing income-related measures and targets and replacing them with new measures on worklessness and educational attainment will incentivise future Governments, as well as this one, to improve children’s life chances. To ensure that we drive the right progress, we should not get distracted by measures that do not tackle the root causes of poverty and should instead focus on measures that do.

What would the Minister say to the witness who said that we risk becoming an “international laughing stock” if we remove the targets? He felt that we had led the world, but removing the targets means that we could lag behind.

No other country in the world has attempted to use statutory targets to legislate away income-related child poverty. The point that I think came out towards the end of the evidence session was that the Department will continue to publish low-income statistics as part of the households below average income—HBAI—figures anyway, so there is no assumption that we are dismissing the matter or undermining the UK’s international credibility, which I think was the point that the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark was trying to make.

The clauses and amendments that we are discussing are not just about publishing data; they are about reporting on the impact of what the data show on children’s life chances. I stress again that amendment 77 relates to

“children living in low income working households.”

The crucial word there is “working”.

Work remains the best route out of poverty. We know that children in workless families are around three times as likely to be in relative low-income as children in families—

rose—

I will give way to the hon. Lady.

The Minister is an intelligent woman and I am sure she knows what we are saying, but let me try just once more. The Government may assert that work is the best way out of poverty and may be the best way for a child to be healthy. They can assert what they want. We are asking for evidence. If a family are working, which could possibly mean two hours a week on a zero-hours contract with the children remaining in poverty, what we, the country and I am sure the Government want—if they want to do something about improving the life chances of the poorest and most marginal children—is to measure that. Let us look at some evidence so that we can have evidence-based policy as opposed to assertions made by the Government.

Let me just put things into context. It is not a case of Government assertions. We are committed to reporting and have stated our commitment, in relation to earlier clauses, to report annually to the House of Commons. Perhaps the hon. Lady will allow me to get on to some of my other points about education and life chances. There is clearly a duty and obligation to report and my Department and the Government as a whole will do so in relation to various aspects of the matter. Despite the Labour party’s bluster it does not recognise root causes in addressing poverty and it fails to recognise that work remains the best route out of it. Only the Government have a committed strategy to look at life chances to overcome many of the root causes of poverty, which previous Labour Governments completely ignored.

Will the Minister give way?

I will not give way. I am going to make progress. Work remains the best route out of poverty and more people are in work under the present Government. Under the present Government and during the previous Parliament we supported people who were long-term unemployed and far removed from the labour market, and helped them to get into work. Those were predominantly households, families and individuals on low incomes.

There has been progress and we are committed to supporting parents to move into work, increasing their earnings and keeping more of what they earn. Universal credit is one example and our investment in childcare and the future national living wage will all play an important combined role. The new statutory worklessness measures will track the proportion of children in workless and long-term workless households in England. The new statutory measures on educational attainment at the end of key stage 4 will hold the Government to account for their successes in raising the attainment of all pupils in England, and specifically the attainment of those who are disadvantaged.

The importance of early years action has rightly been pointed out, and the Government of course agree about that, which is why every three and four-year old in England and the most disadvantaged 40% of two-year-olds are currently entitled to 570 hours of Government-funded early education a year. We are also committed to extending three and four-year-olds’ entitlement to 30 hours a week. The early years pupil premium has also provided another £50 million in extra funding to early years providers.

We welcome those measures. What is the Government’s problem, therefore, about reporting on their efficacy? It should be a good news story for them.

The Department for Work and Pensions will, as I said, continue to publish low income statistics as part of the households below average income report, including statistics on children living in low-income households.

Amendments 78 and 79 would expand the statutory measures to include educational attainment for disadvantaged children at key stages 1, 2, 3 and 4. The amendments seem to underline the significance already placed by the Government on education as an indicator of future life chances, but we do not think it necessary to add those additional measures. Good education, as the Committee fully recognises—points have been made to that effect—is the bedrock on which to promote individuals’ future successes and life chances. At the heart of that we are determined to promote social justice, with the commitment that every child, regardless of background, will be extended opportunities allowing them to fulfil their potential. Raising the educational attainment of all children will increase their capacity to shape their own futures, reducing the risk of future unemployment.

The point about measuring only key stage 4, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said, is that the Government will be measuring achievement possibly made under a Labour Government. If there were to be a change of policy that had an adverse impact on children’s educational attainment, the Government would not be measuring it for many years, and any difficulties might therefore not be addressed until it is too late for an entire generation.

I disagree with the hon. Lady. The Department for Education already publishes a great deal of data on how well pupils are doing by the end of primary school, in addition to how well disadvantaged pupils are doing at school. It is therefore wrong to make the assumption that there are no data and that the assessments come in at the end. Of course, key stage 4 is a vital point in a young person’s education. It represents the culmination of primary and secondary school and provides a consistent point at which to measure attainment across all young people. Successful attainment at key stage 4 underpins future life chances, and pupils who fail to achieve at the end of stage 4 are highly at risk of becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training. Other educational data are published by the Department for Education, so we do not believe that the proposed measure would add sufficient value to warrant inclusion in the life chances measures.

I am sure the Minister understands the essential contradiction in what she is saying. If the Department for Education is publishing data for key stage 4, why does her Department need to publish it? If her Department is publishing data for key stage 4, why not for all the others? Why do we not get everything published all together so that we get a proper picture of any failure that might be about to happen as a result of Government measures? What are the Government afraid of?

With respect, the hon. Lady misses the point. The data are published already across Government, so that information is in the public domain.

I am interested to know why the Minister talks about a commitment to reporting, but is not willing to support our amendment to have reporting to the devolved Administrations. Does she not realise that she is answerable to the people of Scotland on such matters?

I have made the point about the reporting mechanisms already, including during this debate. If I may, I will move on to something the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston touched on with regard to the range of life chances measures including key health indicators for children. In England, we also have key health indicators for disadvantaged children.

Amendment 82 is consequent on amendment 80 and requires the Secretary of State to set out in his report what is meant by “key health indicators”. I agree fully with the importance that the amendments would place on children’s health, but the Committee is aware that the Government have already put in place a well-developed reporting framework—the public health outcomes framework—which supports health improvement and protection at all stages of life, especially in early years. The framework includes a large number of indicators on children and young people’s health and, along with the NHS outcomes framework, sets a clear direction for children’s health that allows anyone to hold the Government to account.

The Department of Health has already commissioned University College London’s Institute of Health Equity to produce health inequalities indicators on a regular basis to complement the framework. Those indicators reflect the recommendations of the Marmot review, and profiles will be published for 150 upper-tier local authorities. Our decision to limit our headline statutory measures to worklessness and educational attainment was deliberate and supported by evidence.

What evidence supports looking only at key stage 4, given the importance of early years?

I come back to the point that information is already being published. The hon. Lady is welcome to engage with the Department for Education to look at the data and to see how they inform the development of the Bill and the decision that we are taking.

Does not the Minister appreciate that the way in which she is approaching the problem highlights just how much the Department for Work and Pensions is giving up on the idea of showing child poverty? Essentially, she has told us that, if we want to have a look at the impact of child poverty, we are to go to the Department for Education. What is the point of the Department for Work and Pensions in relation to the issue?

I would look at this on the basis of a whole Government strategy. This is not about Department versus Department, or Departments working in silos. If the hon. Lady listened to, or even looked at, the detail of what the Government are proposing with their life chances strategy, she would recognise very clearly that this is cross-Government work—the Department for Education, the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions—to focus on the collective root causes of poverty, which cannot be looked at in isolation. It is the Government’s duty to publish data across those Departments and make it available to the public.

Our focus on worklessness and educational attainment is supported by our review, published in 2013. The review makes it clear that educational attainment is the biggest single factor in ensuring that poor children do not end up as poor adults. The evidence in that review shows that long-term worklessness, and the resulting low earnings, is a highly significant factor in trapping children in poverty now. Children in workless families are about three times as likely to be in relative low-income as children in families with at least one person in work. Our new approach regarding life chances, focusing on the root causes, will drive this and future Governments to improve children’s life chances. That is best achieved through a tight focus on work and education, as set out in the life chances measures in clause 4. Therefore, I urge hon. Members to withdraw the amendment.

That was a depressing response. The Minister attacked the measure of low income and showed a depressing lack of logic in relation to our arguments in favour of a more rounded reporting of educational attainment at the earlier stages of child development and health. She simply did not in the least—this has been a feature of this Government and their predecessor for every year that they were in power—address poverty in working families.

I accept that the risk of being in poverty is reduced the more parents are able to be in work but, when two thirds of children living below the poverty line do so in a family where somebody is in paid employment, we have to say that the issue of in-work poverty is a serious one. It shows a real paucity of ambition for those families in working poverty that the Minister is so uninterested, not just in reporting on them, but even in addressing the point in this debate. She appears to live in some sort of fantasy land where those families are doing better; in my opening remarks, I pointed to the fact that they are doing worse. I am afraid that, in the light of the Minister’s depressing response, I wish to divide the Committee on amendment 77.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee proceeded to a Division.

The Ayes were three, the Noes 11. The Noes have it.

On a point of order, Mr Owen. With respect, I believe that may be a miscount. I think that you meant 10 not 11.

I will repeat the figures. The Ayes were three, the Noes 10. The noes still have it.

I beg to move amendment 98, in clause 4, page 5, line 10, at end insert—

‘(5A) The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of 12 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, publish and lay before Parliament the first life chances strategy for England.

(5B) Before the end of the period to which the strategy relates, the Secretary of State must review the strategy and publish and lay before Parliament a revised strategy.”

This ensures that the Government must produce a life chances strategy for England.

The amendment is tabled in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar, who is unable to be here because she is speaking in a debate on steel, which is a massive issue for her. She has kindly provided some speaking notes for me.

The Bill is a disgrace. It seeks to repeal some of the most noble and courageous legislation of recent years—namely, the Child Poverty Act 2010—and the ambition to end child poverty by 2020. It shows a paucity of ambition towards tackling poverty and inequality. It flies in the face of decades of thorough and internationally recognised research into the drivers of child poverty and life chances. It seeks to hide Government failure on child poverty behind narrow, cherry-picked and less relevant reporting obligations. And crucially, to which the amendment speaks, it makes no attempt to set out a route map on how the Government intend to lift the life chances of children in this country.

What is the point in reporting on progress, unless there is a strategy that sets out what the Government will do to make that progress? The amendment would ensure that the Government produce a life-chances strategy for England and publish it before Parliament.

The Committee has received a wealth of evidence from independent experts that explores all the complex drivers of child poverty, built up over decades of professional, rigorous, evidence-based research. While issues such as worklessness and educational attainment, which the Bill measures, are important, there are many complex and inter-linked drivers, the most crucial of which is financial income, which this Government refuse to measure.

We know what the drivers of child poverty are, and we know what steps should be taken to reduce it to give children the best start in life. Under the previous Labour Government, the strategies to tackle child poverty and improve children’s life chances and to ensure that every child mattered and that no one would be disadvantaged by the postcode of where they lived included the introduction of tax credits, which transformed the help available to working individuals and families, the introduction of the national minimum wage and Sure Start centres and the Every Child Matters strategy, which allowed for an holistic examination of what the state could do to combat child poverty.

That is what a strategy on child poverty and life chances would look like from a Government serious about tackling the scourge of poverty and inequality. Would a decent Government designing a strategy for tackling child poverty, or, in this case, improving life chances, include measures such as the pernicious bedroom tax, slashing tax credits for working people, when two thirds of children growing up in poverty live in families where at least one person works, reducing the benefits cap and freezing working-age benefits, the inevitable sanctioning of lone parents struggling to manage bringing up a three-year-old, or cutting Sure Start centres?

We know what works in reducing child poverty and we know what the indicators are to measure it. They include being twice as likely to live in bad housing, with significant effects on physical and mental health and educational achievement. Children in the poorest areas weigh an average of 200 grams less at birth than those born in the most affluent areas. They are more likely to die at birth or infancy, to suffer chronic illness during childhood or have a disability or long-term health condition. Children living in the most deprived areas of England have 19 fewer years of life expectancy than those in the least deprived areas.

Is it my hon. Friend’s experience, as it is mine, that there are parts of the constituency where, on one side of the road, people will live five, six, seven or sometimes 10 years more than those on the other side of the road, because there is a poor estate on one side and richer people right next door who will live 10 years longer?

That is absolutely my experience in Bermondsey and Old Southwark. We have a massive contrast in income inequality. People who live in areas along the riverside have a higher life expectancy, and in other areas, particularly the Grange, Rotherhithe and South Bermondsey wards, about a third of children are living in poverty.

If the child begins badly—if they are unhealthy and there are health inequalities when they are young—the chances of their dying earlier are obviously very much higher.

Absolutely. That was the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar, and it is certainly my experience of working on these issues as a councillor and now as the Member of Parliament for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

Children from poor backgrounds are left behind at all stages of education. Without financial income, parents cannot afford the other things that contribute to life chances: school trips, decent healthy food, or a break or holiday away from home with their family. How can the Government say they are serious about improving life chances when they will stop collecting much of this data and have no evidence-based strategy to demonstrate how they intend to reach their targets?

Although the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions told the BBC’s “Today” programme in 2014 that he would meet the current targets, we know that they will not be met. This does not make the goal of ending child poverty any less achievable than it was. We know from past and international experience that, with the right timeframe and the right political will, we can eradicate child poverty. If the Government were serious, they would not remove the child poverty commitment at all. If they were serious about actually improving children’s life chances, they would not just report on them, but would set out a strategy to show how they intend to improve them. That is the aim of the amendment.

With the amendment, the hon. Gentleman seeks to create a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to publish and lay before Parliament a life chances strategy for England and to review and revise it. Members of the Committee will recognise that the Government have made a clear commitment to publish an annual report containing data on our headline measures of children in workless households and children’s educational attainment. Those are the measures that will drive the action to make a real difference to children’s lives now and in the future.

In addition, the Government have committed to publishing a life chances strategy, which will reflect a wider set of measures on the root causes of child poverty, such as family breakdown, problems with debt, and drug and alcohol dependency. We have said that we will report on those measures annually. I therefore urge the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

We have discussed some of these issues this morning. To be accused of bluster is unfortunate and insensitive when the concern is that an intervention at 16 is far too late. It is unclear exactly what the Government intend to do if they discover—shock horror!—that there are children aged 16 who are educationally disadvantaged. I am fortunate, as the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, to have a constituency where schools are outperforming the national standards, but this is still a massive concern for us. Intervening at the age of 16 is far too late.

I think that those in the sector will conclude that the Government, in failing to accept the amendment, are acknowledging that they have something to hide on the issue, but I will not force the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

Social Mobility Commission

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 5, page 5, leave out lines 16 to 27 and insert—

“5 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission: additional functions

(1) After Section 8A of the Child Poverty Act 2010 insert—”

To leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 8, in clause 5, page 6, leave out lines 15 and 16.

A consequential amendment to amendment 7 to leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

Amendments 7 and 8 seek to leave the current name of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission unchanged. We are shocked at the Government’s brass neck in the way that they seek to airbrush child poverty off the statute book and, indeed, to measure and report on it.

The Child Poverty Act 2010, which established the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, was passed with cross-party support. I was not in the House at the time. I was not in the House at the time; I was one of the external campaigners who warmly welcomed that the Conservative party, in particular, was taking such an interest and demonstrating such an understanding of the importance of income poverty.

The amendments seek to preserve the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in its original form by retaining its name and preventing the technical change to the Child Poverty Act 2010. It would retitle the relevant schedule to reflect the commission’s name change.

Clause 5 will reform the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission to become the Social Mobility Commission. As part of the Government’s drive to improve prospects for everyone in the country, the reformed commission will ensure independent scrutiny of the process to improve and promote social mobility. The reforms to the commission will ensure a high level of independent scrutiny of progress towards a society where everyone is able to play their full part and realise their potential, regardless of their background.

The reformed commission will look beyond the Government’s action to the important role that wider civic society plays in improving social mobility. That is crucial if we as a Government are to meet our ambitions and targets of full employment, in creating 2 million more jobs, and improving the future prospects of disadvantaged children.

The commission has already demonstrated its ability to drive forward the social mobility agenda. Its fully argued annual reports and groundbreaking research on themes such as social mobility in London schools, and evaluating the non-educational barriers to the elite professions, have helped inform the debate on how to improve social mobility. Our reforms will free the commission from having to track the Government’s progress on the old, flawed child poverty targets.

Will the Minister give way?

I will not give way.

Our reforms will enable the commission to invest all its resources in galvanising effort and improving social mobility. Ultimately, reforming the commission to focus on social mobility will help to ensure that all children can reach their full potential. I urge the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment.

I have no objection or disagreement with the Minister on the importance of addressing social mobility and looking at the drivers of improved social mobility. She simply must accept that around the world the compelling evidence of the importance of income poverty to all other outcomes is unquestioned. This Government will set their face against both that international evidence and their own understanding in 2010.

Under the Bill, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission will be renamed the Social Mobility Commission, with a much narrower remit. It will report on progress made towards improving social mobility in the UK, as well as in England.

The Bill is designed to have a limited impact on the current duties of the devolved Administrations. Scotland will continue to be required to produce a child poverty strategy under a duty in a UK Act. Clearly, we will no longer be statutorily bound to report on the income targets, as they are being removed.

Removing income as a measure of poverty ignores the fact that low income impacts on children’s development and wellbeing, including their development in education and their cognitive ability, behaviour and anxiety levels. Child poverty rates that had previously fallen at the beginning of the century are now at risk of being reversed. The IFS projection is that absolute poverty will stand at 3.5 million children before housing costs and 4.7 million after by 2020.

Although worklessness and lack of access to employment are key drivers of poverty, there is no recognition of in-work poverty. Therefore, income has also to be included to ensure the other measures are meaningful and that there is a tangible benchmark. How can this or any Government tackle child poverty if they do not even recognise it exists? The child poverty measurement framework recognises the importance of measuring poverty in consultation with stakeholders such as the Child Poverty Action Group, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Save the Children. It looked at the wide range of factors that can lead to poverty as well as providing an understanding of the impacts of poverty on children and their families.

In addition, the Scottish Government have an ambitious and robust child poverty strategy and host a ministerial advisory group on child poverty, which includes stakeholders from a variety of sectors. On 23 June 2015, Nicola Sturgeon appointed a new, independent adviser on poverty and inequality to help the Scottish Government’s—

Order. I am trying to be helpful to the hon. Lady; she is going a bit wide of the amendment. Would she come back to the amendment moved by Kate Green?

The Scottish Government will investigate a Scottish approach, building on wide support for the poverty measurement framework. We will support Labour to stop the proposals and ensure that the most vulnerable in society are protected.

I believe that we will have the opportunity to return to the matter on clause 6, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

I beg to move amendment 86, in clause 5, page 5, line 23, leave out from “which” to end of line 24 and insert

“section 5 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2015 comes into force.”

This amendment brings the date from which the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission is to be called the Social Mobility Commission into line with the commencement of the other changes to the Commission made by clause 5.

The amendment brings the wording of the provision describing the date from which the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission will be called the Social Mobility Commission in line with the commencement date of clause 5—that is, two months after Royal Assent. This is a purely technical amendment, designed to ensure that the wording of the Bill is consistent.

Amendment 86 agreed to.

Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

I beg to move amendment 9, in clause 6, page 6, line 18, leave out subsection 1.

Leave child poverty targets and measures unchanged.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 97, in clause 6, page 6, line 19, at end insert—

‘(1A) In section 2 (Duty of Secretary of State to ensure that targets in sections 3 to 6 are met) for “2020” substitute “2030”.”

This amends the Child Poverty Act 2010 to set new child poverty targets for 2030 rather than 2020. To be read in conjunction with amendment 9.

Amendment 10, in clause 6, page 7, leave out from beginning of line 25 to end of clause.

Leave child poverty targets and measures unchanged.

Amendment 9 would leave the child poverty targets and measures, currently provided in the Child Poverty Act 2010, unchanged.

With your permission, Mr Owen, I will also speak to amendment 97 on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar who is engaged in a debate on the steel industry in the Chamber.

With the exception of Government Members, the importance of targets and measures of income poverty to internationally agreed definitions is unquestioned. Targets, measuring and reporting on them drive action, show progress and enable comparisons to be made: comparisons of trend data over time and other similar economies with similar demographic make-up. The importance of income poverty in that context, as we heard earlier, is linked to a range of poorer outcomes, in education, health and wider societal costs.

As I have said, there is widespread international acceptance that income is key. The Government in their own evidence review last year showed that the most important factor for children’s outcomes was lack of income. That is not just income among families where no one is in work but insufficient income from earnings, too.

Other indicators are important. It is important and right to track educational, health and child wellbeing outcomes, but those are not the same as tracking poverty, as we can see clearly from the written evidence submitted by the End Child Poverty campaign.

In 2013, the Government carried out a wide consultation on whether the income poverty measurement and target regime provided for by the 2010 Act was flawed and should be replaced. Of the many responses received by the Government to that consultation, the overwhelming majority—97%—of the responses said that the measures and the targets were fine and needed no alteration.

If ever evidence of a Government who really do not care about evidence and analysis is needed, it can be found in the proposals in clause 6. One cannot help but feel that it is not evidence but fear that motivates the Government: fear that failure to meet targets, or demonstrate progress towards them, would at the very least embarrass the Government and might even raise concern in the minds of Ministers that there could be a legal threat.

To be fair—I do wish us to be fair to the Government—those who still believe that they are compassionate Conservatives might find it difficult if measures show that they are failing.

That is a very charitable interpretation from my hon. Friend, but she is a charitable lady, so we should not be surprised by her generosity of spirit in Committee today.

I have spent many years looking at this territory and I know that legal challenges have been mounted in the past. I believe firmly that a challenge would not be viable against a well-intentioned, well-meaning Government who had taken purposeful action to address child poverty even if, due to external circumstances, they were not ultimately able to meet the targets they had set, especially if they were ambitious targets in the time hoped.

What we actually have is a Government who are not bothering to try to meet the targets. In the last Parliament, child poverty fell in the first two years of the coalition Government up to 2011-12. That was the result of measures introduced by Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the previous Labour Government, that had not yet been affected by the measures that the coalition Government set about introducing. Since 2011-12, while the coalition Government and the present Government have been in charge of family income strategy, child poverty has flatlined. There has been no progress at all and no strategy to improve the position of those poor families.

My hon. Friend says that child poverty is flatlining, but for many families, is it not the case that absolute child poverty has risen? That is a particular concern in constituencies such as mine in inner London, and it is linked to in-work poverty.

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come to that point, because it leads into something that I shall say about the measures and targets that we use.

The summer Budget and the measures in the Bill will push more families and more children into poverty. We have not yet got an analysis of the impact of the Bill or the Budget on child poverty and on the numbers of children growing up poor. It is disappointing that the Government have not laid that impact assessment before the House. We cannot know for sure what assessment, if any, the Government have made of the impact. We do not know whether they bothered to make such an assessment. From our knowledge, expertise and understanding of what drives poverty, we can expect that the impact will be pretty adverse. We can also look to the very helpful Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standards research, to which I referred earlier. It points to a particularly harsh effect on the family incomes of some particularly vulnerable groups, including single-parent families, couples with several children and families who face high housing costs.

I am listening intently to the hon. Lady and I agree with much of what she is saying. Does she agree that the alternative targets proposed are not necessarily related to poverty? Family break-up and drug and alcohol dependency affect families from all income deciles, and problem debt is generally a consequence rather than a cause of poverty.

The hon. Lady makes a very good point about the complexity of disentangling causes from consequences and about the fact that Ministers are giving the public distorting messages about what poverty actually is. Let me make this clear: only 4% of parents experience alcohol or drug addiction, and far from all those parents are parents of poor children. Of course, it is devastating for children who grow up in households where parents are addicted, but it is not the same as poverty and it certainly does not explain the 3.7 million children growing up in poverty in the UK today. As she rightly noted, family break-up affects families across the income spectrum. There will be hon. Members in this room who have experienced it in their own families. We should not conflate the two. While it is true that single parents and their children face a higher risk of poverty, there are measures that could be taken to ameliorate and address that consequence, instead of which the Government will make the position of those families worse.

Is there not a challenge in what the Government are attempting to suggest, in that on the one hand the Minister says their policies on tackling poverty are working but on the other suggests that the measurements, accepted by the Prime Minister when they were introduced, are flawed? Does that not expose the Government’s real agenda, which is to mask their lack of effort in tackling the low-wage economy and in-work poverty?

My hon. Friend absolutely makes the case.

As we have heard this morning, it is also ridiculous to think that measuring worklessness alone could be a substitute for measuring poverty, when two thirds of poor children are in households where somebody works. We have repeatedly heard from the Conservative party that the measures are somehow flawed or insufficient, so let us go through carefully what the Child Poverty Act actually requires in relation to measurement and targets.

We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects a rise in relative poverty in this Parliament, but it also expects that it is entirely possible that absolute poverty could fall. So there is a two-way street, if you like, built into the cocktail of measures that we have. We have four measures of poverty in the Child Poverty Act: relative income poverty; absolute poverty; material deprivation; and persistent poverty. That addresses some of the concerns that Government Members might rightly have about tracking only one measure. It is right that when median income is falling, relative income poverty alone is not sufficient to give a good picture of what is happening to our poorest families, although it remains important in tracking the gap that exists.

However, it is also right to recognise that we do not look only at relative income poverty in the Child Poverty Act. We look at absolute poverty, persistent poverty and, crucially, material deprivation. Material deprivation gives a real-life test of poverty and the public can engage with it, get their heads round it and understand it. Also, as I said earlier today, it is a particularly good predictor of health outcomes for children.

Again, what the hon. Lady says chimes strongly with me. Is she aware that, as indicated by the House of Commons Library, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission warned in 2014 that although levels of child poverty are low by historic standards,

“there is no realistic hope of the child poverty targets being met in 2020, given the likely tax and benefit system in place”?

That was in 2014, before any of these changes were made. Is this not a thinly veiled way of covering up the fact that those targets were never going to be reached?

We are certainly not going to reach them under the Government’s current policies; indeed, we will move further away from them. I share the hon. Lady’s scepticism about the Government’s motives, to put it gently. It is really regrettable that, rather than seeking to tackle the problem of poverty, they simply seek to remove it altogether from any understanding of the public policy world.

I hope that the Committee understands that the critique of the Child Poverty Act and its measures and targets as being somehow deficient is completely false. It is also important to understand that the measures the Government proclaim will address poverty are also false, or at least incomplete. As I said earlier this morning, the so-called national living wage will not fully compensate for cuts to benefits and tax credits. What is more, it is highly regrettable that the Government, who are fond of the argument that tax credits are simply a substitute for lower wages, fail to recognise the different functions of pay and tax credits. It is why we have a complex cocktail of policy responses to a set of different drivers of poverty.

Working tax credits compensate for low pay. That means that in households where a family member is low paid, they may derive some benefit from tax credits. Some low-paid people will not do so because they are not in low-paid households; they are the low-paid earner in a household with a high overall household income. So tax credits are a response to low pay, and they help households that suffer low income as a result of low pay to avoid the adverse effects of that low pay.

We should also recognise that the purpose of tax credits for children is not to compensate for low pay or to subsidise employers. It is about sharing among society as a whole the investment that we all have a duty, and indeed an interest, in making in the next generation, who will deliver the future productivity in our economy that will sustain us as we grow old.

We should also remember that while rising pay and an increase in the so-called national living wage are welcome, the national living wage would have to rise very substantially for parents who have no access to any other sources of income—to more than £13 an hour—before their children were lifted out of poverty. Tax credits meet that gap. If it is to be filled entirely by rising wages, that is likely to lead to substantial numbers of job losses, which Ministers would be rightly concerned about.

It is also said that the Child Poverty Act and the measures therein are deficient, because they only look at money. While I strongly contend that money is important, that is also an incorrect analysis of the provisions of the Child Poverty Act. On Second Reading, I particularly sought to draw the House’s attention to that point when I highlighted the fact that written into the Child Poverty Act is a requirement for strategies in relation to child health, children’s education, parental employment, debt—a subject of interest to Government Members—and parenting. Those are all associated with child poverty and provided for in the Child Poverty Act, but they sit alongside the provisions of the Act in relation to measuring relative income poverty and targets for it. They are not the same thing or a substitute.

I am concerned and disappointed by the provisions of clause 6. The clause is cynical and distressing and cheapens the United Kingdom in the eyes of the international community. Most importantly, it means that many of our poor children are at risk of becoming poorer, unobserved. I am frankly shocked at the brazenness of the clause.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar is unable to do so today, with the permission of the Committee I will speak briefly to amendment 97, which was tabled in her name. It addresses the concern that the hon. Member for Livingston pointed out a few moments ago relating to the Government not being on track to meet the 2020 target to eradicate child poverty. That is right, but as Alison Garnham pointed out to us in her oral evidence earlier this week, the Government would not have been completely unable to reach the target in due course. Let us remember that the target, as Ms Garnham pointed out to us, is not to reach zero poverty. A frictional level of poverty will always exist. Families move in and out of poverty, but it might not be sustained if, for example, they quickly return to work. We accept that a reasonable definition of the eradication of child poverty was to reach the best level in Europe—around 10%—which is a realistic target.

The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar suggests that the target could be reasonably met by 2030, based on the trajectory that we were on before the measures in the summer Budget and the Bill. The argument for keeping the target but extending it over a realistic period is interesting. We are naturally disappointed that, for another 10 years, too many children will grow up poor, but we would rather that we retained the measure and the target in the statute book at least to ensure that there was a mechanism to drive progress forward.

My hon. Friend’s amendment is good, and seeks to give the Government leeway to deal with the difficult challenges that have existed since the 2008 financial crash and with the fact that pay either fell or was frozen in order to sustain people in employment. We recognise that time must be bought to cope with the consequences of the world financial collapse, but it is not right to give up the ambition for this generation or for future generations of children. We want the target to remain on the statute book, and amendment 97 seeks a realistic end date for that target.

Amendment 10 is similar to amendment 9 and merely addresses the same point elsewhere in the Bill.

As many hon. Members will know, I worked for the Child Poverty Action Group before I was elected to the House in 2010, and of all the measures in the Bill this is probably the one that I feel most pained, outraged and angered by. It is a disgrace. It is a disgrace and a shame that will affect our children, and I hope the Government will think again before it is too late.

I am conscious of the time, so I just want to pick out a few reasons why the SNP oppose the changes. The loss of income targets means that a fundamental driver of poverty—how much money a person has in their pocket—is essentially being deprioritised. Focusing on worklessness ignores the 67% of UK children in poverty who live in a household in which one or more adults are working. That is in-work poverty.

With the amendment, hon. Members seek to preserve the Child Poverty Act 2010 in its original form, including the much discussed income measure and targets, and to extend the target year of the measures from the financial year beginning 1 April 2020 to that beginning 1 April 2030. The Government do not support that position.

First, on amendments 9 and 10, the existing measures and targets in the Child Poverty Act 2010 focus on the symptoms of child poverty while failing to tackle the root causes. We have had an extensive discussion this morning about many of the root causes. As I have described, the fundamental weaknesses with the existing statutory framework, set around the four income-related targets of child poverty, have become all too apparent.

Will the Minister give way?

No, I will not give way.

Removing the flawed income-related measures and targets and replacing them with the new measures of worklessness and educational attainment will drive this Government and future Governments to improve disadvantaged children’s life chances, and it will strengthen our approach by tackling the root causes of child poverty. We do not believe that any number of duties, producing a UK strategy, or placing new demands on local authorities, would be a substitute for a clear commitment to report on the real root causes, which evidence tells us will make the biggest difference to improving the life chances of children and, importantly, transforming their lives. We will report on the life chances measures in this Bill and will be judged on our actions.

On amendment 97, I have described the fundamental weaknesses of the existing statutory measures and targets. It is a framework that incentivises Government action to move people from just below an arbitrary line to just over it, rather than tackling the fundamental issues that affect families, children and their life chances. Extending the target year to financial year 2030-31 will not overcome any of those fundamental weaknesses. Only by removing the flawed income-related targets and replacing them with new measures will we drive this and future Governments to improve and focus on children’s life chances. The Government are focused on doing that; we will focus our resources on achieving those outcomes. It is only right and fair to children and taxpayers that we do so. The Government will not throw good money after bad; it is not fair on our children or our taxpayers, and that is precisely what Opposition Members seek to do.

Will the Minister give way?

No, I will not.

We have discussed the flaws and weaknesses of the measures to some extent. Members suggest that we should extend the deadline on the same flawed measures and force future Governments to spend money on tackling symptoms, not the root causes. I recognise that Members will probably press the amendments, but I urge them not to do so.

I certainly will not withdraw amendment 9. I feel all the more strongly that it must be pressed to a Division in light of the Minister’s response. She is a very intelligent woman, and I have a great deal of respect for her as a Minister. She is extremely able, but she must know that what she is saying is a disgrace that overlooks the myriad evidence before us and—as I think my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark wished to point out—the position of her own party and the Prime Minister in his lecture in 2006. Her party supported what she now calls a “flawed measure” when it supported the Child Poverty Act in 2010.

If the Minister is going to try to tell me that she now thinks that the Government have had some awakening that was not available to them in 2010, I invite her to present the evidence that was not available in 2010 and is available today. She has not done so. The fact is that these targets are internationally recognised and respected, have been over many decades and were endorsed in the Government’s own consultation in 2013. There is no reason why we should abandon them now.

May I raise two points with the right hon. Lady? First, she says there is a temptation to move people from just below an arbitrary line to just above it. That is not what happened under the Labour Government. We raised incomes in every single income decile. We were ambitious for all of our children, and we remain so today. The idea that having targets or duties does not work is also a completely flawed argument. Conservative Members often like to point out that child poverty rose under Labour. Yes, it did, in one or two years, but I would point out that it doubled under the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997, whereas Labour took a million children out of poverty between 1999 and 2010. However, I accept that it rose in one or two years. As soon as we could see that we were veering off progress towards the target, we took action to bring ourselves back on track. That is the importance of targets. Any Government can make mistakes and any Government can be faced with external circumstances that make progress difficult, but without ambition and without targets to measure that ambition, there is no incentive, requirement or likelihood of action being taken to correct progress as soon as it is right and possible to do so.

I feel this matter very personally, as hon. Members may identify from the way I am speaking in the Committee this afternoon. I will press amendment 9 to a vote. I urge hon. and right hon. Members, in the interests of future generations of children, not to scrap the Child Poverty Act.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. It is her last speech in this Committee. I thank her and I am sure we will all miss her.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

I beg to move amendment 87, in clause 6, page 8, line 23, at end insert—

“(c) in the section heading omit “Regulations and”.”

This amendment removes the words “Regulations and “ from the heading of section 28 of the Child Poverty Act 2010, consequential on the changes of substance to this section made by clause 6(7), which removes references to regulations.

This amendment removes the words “Regulations and” from the title of section 28 of the Child Poverty Act 2010, consequential to the changes made in clause 6(7), which removes the regulation-making powers in the 2010 Act. There is only one order-making power. It is therefore logical to remove the obsolete component of the title, “Regulations and”. This is a technical amendment designed to ensure that the wording and section titles in the 2010 Act are consistent. The change is a matter not of policy but of clarity and consistency.

Amendment 87 agreed to.

Question put, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

I beg to move amendment 25, in clause 7, page 8, line 32, leave out subsection (2).

This amendment would remove the changes to the benefit cap.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 26, in clause 7, page 8, line 38, leave out “£23,000 or £15,410” and insert “£26,000 or £18,200”.

This amendment would keep the benefit cap level in London at the same rate as today.

Amendment 27, in clause 7, page 8, line 39, leave out “£20,000 or £13,400” and insert “£26,000 or £18,200”.

This amendment would keep the benefit cap level outside London at the same rate as today.

Amendment 71, in clause 7, page 9, line 6, leave out subsection (3).

To retain the current link between the benefit cap and estimated average earnings.

Amendment 38, in clause 7, page 9, line 44, leave out subsection (5).

This amendment is consequential to amendment 25.

Our amendments are intended to protect people from the Conservative Government’s dangerous blanket cut to benefits. The clause lowers the benefit cap set by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and applies it to a large number of benefits. Our group of amendments would remove the new cap and ensure that the original cap remained for inside and outside London, recognising the significantly higher cost of living in London. Amendment 25 would remove the subsection that makes changes to the original 2012 Act, while amendments 26 and 27 would change the wording of the Bill so as to leave the benefit cap in the original Act unchanged. Amendment 38 is consequent on the other amendments.

The original benefit cap in the 2012 Act was introduced so that benefit claims could not exceed average earnings. The Government have not introduced such a rationale for the imposition of the new cap—the rates at which it is to be set are entirely arbitrary. Where did the figures come from? We have no information on that and we cannot understand the rationale. We must remember that the rates are not only numbers or bands, or digits on a piece of paper; those numbers represent a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK.

The Government are not only blindly pushing ideologically driven cuts but applying the cuts with entirely arbitrary figures that have no justification. The families to whom the cuts will apply must have answers on where the figures have come from. I and, I am sure, many others have already had a stream of constituents coming to our surgeries to complain about cuts and sanctions that seem nonsensical and that they cannot understand.

Labour’s amendment 71 would maintain the link between the benefit cap and estimated average earnings that the original Act intended. Although we oppose the cap generally, we also oppose removing the link with average earnings and introducing an arbitrary cap, so we support the principle of that amendment. I commend it.

The utterly thoughtless way in which the Government are making the benefit changes is staggering. The breadth of social groups that will be affected and the depth to which they will be affected should make Ministers hang their heads in shame. The burden of the cuts will be felt not only across Scottish and other devolved Administrations, although we are doing our best to protect people, but throughout all parts of the United Kingdom.

The National Housing Federation estimated that under the £23,000 cap in London, families face a shortfall between benefit and rent of £27.79 per week; the weekly shortfall under a £20,000 cap ranges from £37.40 in Yorkshire and Humberside to £67.35 in the south-east, based on the current rent agreement. There is also danger that families and individuals living in temporary accommodation who, by virtue of their situation, are already deemed to be vulnerable by a local authority will no longer be able to manage rent payments and will find themselves homeless once again. We are making some of the most vulnerable in society even more vulnerable.

Some disability-related benefits are to be protected, which is welcome, but countless charities and lobbying groups have pointed out that disabled people and their carers sometimes also rely on a variety of other benefits that are being capped by the Bill. It is not enough to protect a few disability-specific benefits from the cap; the Government need to look at the bigger picture. Again, there does not seem to be any joined-up or strategic thinking behind the cap.

The effects of the cap will also be felt by those who have life-threatening or terminal illnesses and who require care. They and their carers will be subject to the cap. How can we possibly justify capping and cutting support for some of the most vulnerable and ill people in our society?. It seems nonsensical and the Scottish National party is absolutely opposed to it. Not only are the cuts detrimental to the ability of those who are sick and disabled to live independently, but the poverty and debt might lead to even more vulnerability.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. It is also an enormous pleasure to serve on this Committee, to have heard contributions such as that made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston, who is departing from her current position on the Front Bench, and to hear the passion with which she gave voice to the beating heart of the Labour party and the outrage at how the Bill is being introduced and its extraordinary justification. If anyone ever questions where the Labour party’s heart is, they just need to hear her speech from before lunch.

I wish to speak to amendment 71. According to the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Those words have survived for thousands of years, but could almost have been written yesterday by an author scratching his head over some of the perverse measures in the Bill. I suspect that historians will one day look back on these debates and cite the benefit cap as a classic example of an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in modern politics: a solution without a problem. After all, we have had a household benefit cap for more than two years.

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend so early. She may be about to say this, in which case I apologise for stealing her moment. As she says, nothing is new under the sun. We had a benefit cap in the 1960s when it was called the wage stop rule. Women in particular campaigned to end it, which was to the benefit of poor children.

And of course, as we will see, those who will be hit most adversely by the benefit cap are, yet again, women.

Ministers seem to be no closer to pinning down a convincing rationale for the policy today than they were four years ago when the Welfare Reform Act 2012 was debated. To the extent that there has been an underlying theme throughout this period, however, it has been the ever-slippery concept of fairness. As the Secretary of State put it when introducing the Welfare Reform Bill on Second Reading in March 2011:

“The principle is that people who are unemployed and on benefits should not be receiving more than average earnings. It is a matter of fairness, so that those who are working hard and paying their taxes do not feel that someone else will benefit more by not playing a full part in society.”—[Official Report, 9 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 921-922.]

It is almost quaint, with more than four years’ worth of hindsight, to imagine Government policy being drawn up with such sensitivity to people’s feelings, but the Secretary of State’s words are revealing to the extent that they disclose that the closest thing there was to a principled reason for introducing the cap was the perception of the problem, rather than evidence of one.

As I said, that has come to be a tendency over the past few years. In fact, further evidence appeared just a few days ago when the House was asked to consider the Trade Union Bill, which seems to have been designed to allay tabloid hysteria more than to deal with a real problem. When the issue in question is out-of-work benefits, tabloid hysteria is in abundant supply. Goaded by Ministers, the entire debate has become hijacked by splashy headlines that generated heat rather than light. It is time that the plane of discussion was brought back down to earth.

I said that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to Tory welfare reform, but that is not strictly true, because lowering the cap requires an innovation that is a novel twist to the idea of fairness. The link between the household cap and estimated average earnings has been severed. That is quite a spanner in the works in terms of the Government’s efforts to prop up one of their primary justifications for the cap. The principle that working taxpayers, when they are fortunate enough not to have to claim benefits in order to survive, must be helped to feel positive about the way that the benefit system operates was always a dubious basis on which to make policy. The fact that that was supposed to have been achieved by setting the cap at the level of earnings makes clause 7(3) even more extraordinary.

Returning to the debates of the 2012 Act, the last Welfare Reform Bill, we might find the comments of the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) particularly instructive. He was the poor, unfortunate Minister saddled with the unenviable task of defending the cap and attempting to provide a coherent rationale for it. Fortunately for him, he did have a link with average earnings to fall back on. As he explained:

“Our policy approach, and the Government’s clear intent, is to have a cap that bears reference to average earnings. That is necessary for the credibility of our benefit system. It is the right place to set the cap.”––[Official Report, Welfare Reform Public Bill Committee, 17 May 2011; c. 952.]

He was either right then or he was wrong, but are we not being contradicted by the changes to the law that the Government are intending now? Evidently, the new generation of Ministers take a different view. While there may be many problems that can be laid at Ministers’ feet, a fall in average earnings over the past two years is not, probably, one of them. According to the much-quoted Office for National Statistics, since the level of the cap was first established at £26,000 a year, average earnings have risen, not by much—just 0.1%, in fact—but they have risen. If wages are going up, why is the cap coming down if it is supposed to be, in any way, linked to average earnings? It is a simple question and I am sure that there will be a simple answer.

It has therefore proved necessary for the Government to take a different tack in arguing the increasingly tenuous case for lowering the cap. The alternative explanation that Ministers have increasingly relied on is that the cap is a cost-saving measure on one hand, and that it provides an incentive for people to move into work on the other. We now do not have a link to average incomes; we have the cap as an incentive to get people into work and that it will be a cost-saving measure.

My hon. Friend is making a compelling case. May I ask her to comment on recent evidence that emerged over the summer, which showed that although some people did move into work—Tony Wilson, in his oral evidence, told us a little bit about that—those who did not probably could not? They were either the parents of very young children, were suffering from ill health or there was a disability in the household.

Absolutely right. Indeed, some of the evidence that we heard was that those who did move into work were not in what would be called sustainable work. For example, a single mother of many children who perhaps had been moved into 16 hours a week of work to avoid the cap, would find it impossible to sustain that work during the school holidays when her four children were back at home and she did not have childcare.

People temporarily may have been able to move into work and back out again, but we can see the continued high level of spend on discretionary housing payments to support these people. That in itself is evidence that it is not sustainable to try to push people for whom it is not possible to find work into work. Indeed, the evidence shows—I am sorry to keep harping on about evidence, but I always thought that policy was based on it—that most people who were affected by the benefit cap are not even deemed fit for work.

I will just go back. Having abandoned the idea of linking the cap with earnings, the Ministers are now relying on it being a cost-saving measure and an incentive for people to move into work. Of course, neither of those arguments stack up. I will come back to that. There continues to be a bad smell of unfairness, which will not go away. Just two days ago, the Minister was trotting out the same old argument. She said:

“The cap is a simple matter of fairness”.––[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2015; c. 144.]

However, she left us guessing, as we still are, exactly what was meant and how this could be fair as the cap seems to have been set at an arbitrary level.

Amendment 71 would remove subsection (3) and maintain the link between the level of the cap and estimated average earnings. If we are to accept the argument of the previous Minister that this connection is necessary for the credibility of the cap—a tall order, frankly—I can see no good reason for removing this requirement from the legislation. If the very concept of the benefit cap is to inspire even a shred of public confidence, it is incumbent on Ministers to explain why they propose to hand themselves extraordinarily broad powers to lower the cap at any time for any reason.

Ministers are essentially asking us to trust them to make decisions on the basis of fairness. Frankly, given their track record and given what the Minister said before the luncheon Adjournment—that she did not want to continue throwing good money after bad—it would be fair, for some people at least, to be somewhat sceptical of their understanding of fairness. To trust them to make these decisions on the basis of fairness is a slippery concept if there ever was one. The definition of the word seems in any event to be the subject of regular revisions apparently based on nothing more than political whimsy and the need of George Osborne to continue to save money.

Does my hon. Friend share the concern that some of the Government agenda is being driven by think-tanks that have done none of their own research on these issues and were unable to provide evidence to back up the assertions that they made in the witness sessions?

May I also say how much I enjoyed my lunch?

Yes, there was an opportunity when we heard evidence. We asked the Government for evidence. We asked them again and again. I have tabled several parliamentary questions and have not had particularly good answers. We have asked questions in the House about their justification and evidence, and we got nowhere. If there is an opportunity, it would be great finally to hear from the think-tanks, which I know the Government are close to—at least some of them—and for them to come forward and give us the evidence on which the policy is based.

I was struck that, while hyperbole was in good measure, we had no evidence. We had people coming in again and again telling us the occasional story. It is as though the policy is based on the one family that was found living in Westminster with the flatscreen television and a Mercedes outside, or whatever the extraordinary example was. That is so removed from the reality of the day-to-day lives of people who are affected today by previous benefit caps and will be affected even more by further benefit caps.

The best way to make policy is on the basis of evidence. For that reason, the Labour party has made it clear what our position now is. We oppose the Tories’ reduction in the benefit cap, so we will therefore be joining the Scottish Nationalists on amendments 25 and 26. We will review Labour policy with regard to the principle of the benefit cap and we will look at evidence. It is right to say that Labour Members who represent London constituencies feel that week after week in our surgeries we see an awful lot of evidence of the adverse effect of the benefit cap and how it does not provide an incentive to get people into work, how it does not save money, and how, more than anything else, it is not fair.

We want in the next few months to put forward a good body of evidence to show, one way or the other, whether a benefit cap is right on any basis. For that reason, although we oppose the lowering of the benefit cap now, we have committed ourselves to looking carefully into the evidence, and we encourage people, including the Government, to come forward and share the evidence with us. If the Government want to give us the evidence on which they are basing this appalling policy—this cruel and nasty policy—I would be very glad to hear it and very glad to read it.

More than political whimsy is needed. If we must have a cap, we should at least make it clear that there should be an objective benchmark by which the level should be determined. I will therefore press amendment 71 to a vote.

Good afternoon to everyone. These grouped amendments, in simple terms, are intended to counteract the changes that we are introducing to the benefit cap, as we have already heard. Amendment 25 would prevent the proposed reduction in its rate. Amendments 26 and 27 would prevent our plans to introduce a tiered structure to the cap, which will have different rates for claimants living in Greater London and for claimants living elsewhere. The two amendments would also keep the cap at its current rate with the same split between the level for lone parents and couples and the level for single people without children.

Amendment 71 would prevent us from establishing a new mechanism for reviewing the future level for the cap by maintaining the current link with average earnings. Amendment 38 is a more technical amendment that appears to attempt to direct future parliamentary procedures for introducing regulations for the cap. I will come to that amendment later. The cap was introduced in 2013 at the level of £26,000 a year with a lower rate of £18,200 a year for single people without children. Currently, the cap remains at that level.

The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury has mentioned why the Government introduced the cap, but I will remind the Committee that it was introduced because it was felt—and is felt—that it was not fair for out-of-work households to receive considerably more in benefits than many working households earn. That view is shared by many people across the country, with around 70% of the public supporting a cap. The cap is also a key part of the overall plan to reform not only the structure of welfare benefits but attitudes towards welfare benefits, and it was introduced to increase incentives to work and to promote fairness to those on benefits and those in work. At the time, as we recall, we were trying to address the bigger economic issues of the deficit.

I understand the point about work incentives. We heard from Tony Wilson that a small number of people have moved into work, but is it fair to talk about changing the attitudes of people who are too sick to work? They are caught by the benefit cap, too.

This is part of the wider welfare reforms. The Government are supporting people who are sick and ill. Depending on their health conditions, they are receiving support in welfare.

Taking that a little further, would the Minister be prepared to accept that people on employment and support allowance, who are therefore deemed not fit to work, ought to be exempted from the benefit cap if it is her policy to support those who cannot work?

The hon. Lady will be perfectly aware that people who are very ill, particularly those in the support group, are supported by the Government through many, many welfare measures. That covers a range of conditions.

I am sorry to interrupt, but the Minister will understand that this is terribly important to people with long-term health problems. Some 80,000 people have been placed in the work-related activity group with a long-term prognosis that they are unlikely to see a change in their condition in at least the next two years. That was the finding of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions report last year. Further, 8,000 people in that group over time and, from the figures announced by the Secretary of State the other day, some 4,500 people in that group now have degenerative conditions, which means that they will never be more well than they currently are.

Those in receipt of the support component of employment and support allowance are, of course, exempt from the cap. The Secretary of State has recently spoken about ESA and the additional support that can be given to individuals with particular health conditions. The Government are working on that right now, completely outside of this Bill.

On the point about disabled people being protected, there is an exemption for the support group—fair enough—but 440,000 disabled people are directly affected by the bedroom tax. The personal independence payment and disability living allowance changes will mean that, according to Government estimates, some 600,000 disabled people will lose out directly. Access to Work is supporting fewer disabled people, and there are fewer working-age disabled people in work as a proportion of the overall number than in 2010. The benefits freeze has directly affected even those in the support group of employment and support allowance, so it is incorrect to keep claiming that disabled people have been protected.

Actually, we have been very clear about safeguards for vulnerable people. [Interruption.] We have. Perhaps this is just a fault line between our two political parties, as the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury has already said, and the Opposition intend to vote against this come what may, but we made it very clear that protecting the vulnerable is one of the key principles of our welfare reforms. [Interruption.] I appreciate that Opposition Members want to comment from a sedentary position, but there seems to be a huge area of difference between our two parties. One of the key principles of our welfare reforms is that we will put in place safeguards to protect the most vulnerable. There will be a range of measures, including discretionary housing payments, but it is wrong just to assume that we are deliberately not looking after vulnerable people when we clearly are.

To get to the nub of the matter, perhaps the Prime Minister put it as well as it could be put at Prime Minister’s questions:

“I say that a family that chooses not to work should not be better off than one that chooses to work.”—[Official Report, 16 September 2015; Vol. 599, c. 1039.]

Is that the essence of the Minister’s position?

This Government and the previous coalition Government have been clear that many of our welfare reforms include the principle of fairness, to which incentivising work is absolutely crucial. However, this comes back to a number of principles relating to welfare reforms and not just the benefit cap. It is right that the Government do the right thing and seek to support people who are long-term unemployed to help them get closer to the labour market, while, at the same time, supporting those who are unable to work for a variety of conditions, and that is exactly the safety net that the welfare state provides.

The central difficulty facing the Minister is that the vast majority of people who are affected by the benefit cap are not those in families who choose not to work. Those on jobseeker’s allowance who do not take up a reasonable offer get sanctioned already under current legislation. For that reason, I hope that, when we get to the next group and I press amendment 68—I will now call that the “David Cameron” amendment, because it encapsulates David Cameron’s position—all hon. Members will vote for it.

Order. That intervention was too long, and if you are referring to the Prime Minister, please do so either by his title or his constituency.

If I may go back to my comments on the amendment, since the benefit cap was introduced in 2013, more than 16,000 previously capped households have entered work, and capped households are more than 41% more likely to go into work than similar uncapped households.

I hear what the Minister is saying about families moving into work, which is good, but does she not accept that the vast majority are on low-paid zero-hours contracts? As we have already debated, she is not willing to put a definition on decent work or even look into having one.

Absolutely not. I do not accept that at all. As we saw yesterday with the employment figures, over the last year, employment has increased by 400,000 and 90% of those jobs are full-time jobs.

The Bill reduces the cap, as we are discussing. Again, it comes back to the principles. Reducing the levels of the cap will reinforce a message that work pays. It brings a degree of fairness but supports the principles of work, and it works alongside what the Government are doing to support individuals to get into work as well.

The new tiered levels also recognise that housing constitutes one of the biggest costs for households. In London, housing benefit awards are, on average, £3,000 a year more than elsewhere in the country. Even in the south-east, as the average housing costs are around only half that of London, we believe that it is right for the cap to take into account those differences. We believe that the new tiered level for the cap will go further to achieve our aims of increasing the incentives to work.

The Bill also removes the current link between the level of the cap and average earnings. Back in 2011, the benefit cap was a new concept. At that time, with no benchmark, average earnings provided a basis by which to set the cap in order to achieve its aim, but times have moved on. We have evaluated the impacts of the cap, and the cap has been proven to work, as I mentioned, in terms of supporting people back into work.

Will the Minister give some evidence to back up her assertion that it has worked? What were the measures of success? How many people have moved into work? What would success look like for the Government if this measure was to go forward as it is in the Bill?

I understand that the evaluation has been published, and since its introduction, more than 35,000 households who had previously been capped have moved off the cap. As I have said, the evaluation shows that the cap is working, with households 41% more likely to enter work than similar households who were just below the benefit cap. This is of course about the behavioural effects, but we have to, and should, put it into the context of incentivising work and supporting people to help them get into work, which is clearly part of what the Government are doing through their welfare reform agenda.

This is genuinely a request for clarification. The Minister said a moment ago that 35,000 people—I think she said this—had moved off the cap. Is she saying that those 35,000 people moved into work? Or is she saying that they stopped claiming benefits, or that they moved house? What actually happened to them?

It is a combination of factors. The most common reason for people moving off the cap is a movement into work. There will be a variety in terms of the nature of work roles, depending on individual circumstances, but it is also a reflection of the fact that they have been supported into work.

In my borough of Southwark, initially 500 or so households were meant to be affected, with a large number of them in Peckham. The local authority intervened to support some of those families to make decisions. Some people did go to work. I would like to see that figure of 35,000 broken down a bit further, because other people were supported on to benefits to provide the exemption from the cap. There is a mixed picture and I am sure the Minister did not want to lead more people on. However, I also wanted to intervene on the local authority side—

Order. We might have a long afternoon in front of us and it will be even longer if interventions are long. I say to you, take the opportunity to speak from the Back Benches before the Minister has responded. I would ask for interventions—

rose—

No. You have had the opportunity. The Minister is now responding to the debate, and she has been very generous with interventions.

Thank you, Mr Owen. I heard the hon. Gentleman’s intervention and I know he was touching on local authorities. I will seek clarity on what he was asking and perhaps I will come back to him, if I may, with some details or some further information.

Through clause 8, we are introducing new provisions that require the Secretary of State to take into account the national economic situation and any other matters that they may consider relevant when they review the future level of the cap. The new provisions will allow the cap to be maintained at levels that better support the aims of our welfare reforms, balancing the key aims of strengthening work incentives and promoting fairness between those in work and those in receipt of out-of-work benefits.

That requires a broad assessment of the most significant long-term developments and trends that might affect our economy, which are also important to households up and down the country. Earnings and housing costs are very much a part of that assessment, as are other factors such as inflation, benefit rates, the strength of the labour market and any other matter that may be crucial and relevant at that time. That is why it is important to maintain the new provisions and allow the Secretary of State the ability to consider the context of the cap in a broad and balanced way, without being pinned by any single factor.

Amendment 38 is more of a technical amendment than one that seeks to make any changes to the structure and nature of the cap. It would omit clause 7(5) of the Bill, which omits subsection 97(3) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. That was the part of the 2012 Act that prescribed the parliamentary procedures under which regulations, made under the benefit cap primary powers, should be subject.

The subsection in question prescribes that the first set of regulations made under section 96 of the 2012 Act should fall under the affirmative parliamentary procedure and so should be subject to debate by each House of Parliament before passing into law. That was the correct thing to do because, as was explained in the debates during the passage of the 2012 Act, the Government’s intention was to provide for a great degree of the structural detail of the cap in secondary legislation. This subsection of the 2012 Act ensured that Parliament would have a full opportunity to debate those detailed plans.

Those debates subsequently took place when the Government introduced the Benefit Cap (Housing Benefit) Regulations 2012, which were debated separately, under the affirmative procedures, in both Houses of Parliament on 6 November 2012. As the undertaking to debate those first regulations has been fulfilled, we considered it opportune to take this chance to remove from the legislation what has now become an obsolete piece of law.

I can assure the Committee that that does not mean that we will take the view that the Secretary of State should not be accountable to Parliament for any future changes to the cap, in particular to its level. Following a review of the cap, if the Secretary of State considers that the level of the cap should be amended, clause 8 provides that they can do so by regulations. It also prescribes that regulations that decrease any of the levels of the cap cannot be made unless they have been debated and approved by each House. Parliament will therefore have a full opportunity to question and debate the rationale for any future reduction in the cap. Increases to the level of the cap will also have to be introduced by regulations, but we believe it is sufficient that they are subject to the negative resolution procedure, and so a debate in the House is not required before an increase can be implemented.

In conclusion, I reiterate that our introduction of the benefit cap has been, first, to support and encourage people to look for work, which is something we will continue to build on. Secondly, introducing a reduced tiered level for the cap will create a greater incentive to work, while ensuring that the impacts of the cap are spread more evenly throughout the country. Thirdly, removing the requirement to base the level of the cap solely on the level of average earnings and replacing it with a broader measure that requires the Secretary of State to take into account the national economic situation will help to ensure that the cap remains at the most appropriate level.

These are important reforms that Members and the public will support. I urge hon. Members to withdraw their amendments.

It is fairly simple. The Bill and the changes to the benefit cap are about taking people to the brink and pushing them over the edge into even greater poverty and, worst of all, pushing people who are severely disabled, sick and vulnerable, not to mention hundreds of thousands of children, into even greater poverty.

Our amendments would mitigate the effects of the Government’s reckless blanket cap to benefits and of the changes in the Government’s austerity measures, which are being imposed on Scottish people who did not even vote for this Government. In Scotland, we are already spending £300 million to mitigate the black hole that Westminster created with the bedroom tax. I wonder how the Minister can justify saying that she is protecting some of the most vulnerable and disabled people when even the severe disablement allowance is itself included in the cap. I can only assume that she will be supporting our amendment 34.

Ultimately, lone parents, women and the most vulnerable will be pushed into even greater poverty, which could lead many into further debt, or vulnerable people into developing mental health issues and problems, spiralling into greater problems and leaving them out of work for longer. Surely those are the very people whom we should be supporting and giving the greatest help to, rather than pushing them further over the edge and putting greater pressure on the third sector and charities. I urge all Members to support our amendments.

rose—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is a new Member, so I am being generous. Back Benchers have the opportunity to speak before I call the Minister, so in future he should indicate at that point. He may make a small contribution now, before we have the vote.

Thank you, Mr Owen. I apologise for getting things in the wrong order. I also apologise to the Minister if my intervention was too long. I am grateful for opportunities to intervene.

The point that I was making was to do with the 35,000 figure mentioned by the Minister. When the benefit cap was approaching, many local authorities across the country rolled out additional support to individuals whom they suspected would be directly affected by the cap. In the borough of Southwark, that included support to identify whether some individuals might qualify for other benefits that would exempt them from the cap. It is therefore not accurate to suggest that 35,000 people moved into work if, for example, someone in a household was moved into the employment support allowance support group or identified as meeting the disability living allowance requirements. The Minister suggested that 35,000 moved into work, but the Government might actually have created a perverse incentive and welfare dependency, which they talked a lot about trying to avoid.

My second point was about local authority resources. It is not free for local government to provide that level of additional support to individuals directly affected. Is the Minister suggesting that there will be more support for local authorities as the measures in the Bill approach implementation to ensure that they can meet the demand of individuals affected to support them to move home, so they may reduce some of their costs, to move into work or to move on to different benefits? Will there be another jump in the level of payments made to organisations such as Citizens Advice by Government in order to meet the jump in demand? For example, in Southwark 40% more people were seeking advice, reassurance and information from Citizens Advice on how to avoid some of the measures proposed by the Government.

Those are some of the concerns that I am trying to get across. I apologise again if I expressed them at the wrong point.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

I beg to move amendment 104, in clause 7, page 8, line 36, at end insert—

“( ) Regulations under this section shall not be made in relation to persons—

(a) responsible for the care of a child aged below 2;

(b) responsible for the care of and in receipt of Carers Allowance in respect of, but not living with, a person in receipt of Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independence Payment or Attendance Allowance;

(c) in temporary accommodation following an incident or incidents of domestic violence.”

To provide that the benefit cap does not apply to benefit claimants who will find it most difficult to enter work.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 67, in clause 7, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(5C) Regulations under this section must provide for an exemption from the benefit cap for persons living in temporary accommodation into which they have been placed by a local authority which has found them to be in priority need (as defined in Part 7 of the House Act 1996 and the Homelessness (Priority Need for Accommodation)(England) Order 2002).”

To provide that the benefit cap will not apply to homeless families living in temporary accommodation after being assessed as having a priority need.

Amendment 68, in clause 7, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(5C) Regulations under this section must provide for an exemption from the benefit cap for claimants of Jobseeker’s Allowance, including income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (as defined in section 1 (4) of the Jobseekers Act 1995) where the claimant has not received a reasonable offer of a job.”

To provide that the benefit cap will not apply to job seekers who have not received a reasonable offer of employment.

Amendment 69, in clause 7, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(5C) Regulations under this section must provide an exemption from the benefit cap for persons in receipt of —

(a) carer’s allowance (see section 70 of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992),

(b) employment and support allowance, including income-related employment and support allowance (as defined in section 1(7) of the Welfare Reform Act 2007) (see section 1 of the Welfare Reform Act 2007),

(c) incapacity benefit (see section 30A of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992),

(d) income support (see section 124 of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992),

(e) severe disablement allowance (see section 68 of the Social Security, Contributions and Benefits Act 1992).”

To provide that the benefit cap may not be applied to anyone claiming Carer’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Income Support or Severe Disablement Allowance.

Amendment 70, in clause 7, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(5C) Regulations under this section must provide for an exemption from the benefit cap for persons in receipt of Universal Credit who are not subject to all work-search requirements as set out in Section 22 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012.”

To provide that the benefit cap may not be applied to anyone claiming Universal Credit who is not subject to work-search requirements.

Amendment 107, in clause 7, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(5C) Regulations under this section must provide for an exemption from the benefit cap for persons in employment, as defined by the Office for National Statistics.”

To provide that the benefit cap will not apply to anyone who meets the definition of employment used by the Office for National Statistics, which states that “anyone doing one hour or more a week of paid work is counted in the employment figures”.

Amendment 72, in clause 7, page 9, line 11, leave out paragraphs (b), (e), (h), (i) and (l)

This amendment is consequential to amendment 69.

Now that we have established that fairness is a red herring in the Government’s argument, I should like to save the Minister some time by following the line of argument to which I expect the Government to turn next: the equally spurious claim of delivering fiscal savings. Like other arguments that we have heard over the years, that one simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It was perfectly apparent even before the cap was introduced to anyone who cared to pay attention that the most pronounced effect was to increase the number of people falling into arrears, finding themselves unable to pay their rent and, consequently, to increase the number of people being made homeless and turning up to their local authority for help.

The previous Government made it clear that households made homeless as a result of the cap would not be held responsible for their situation. Making that commitment was the right thing to do. I look forward to hearing Ministers reiterate that assurance today.

Regardless of whether the benefit cap has played a role, local authorities remain legally obliged to rehouse families who are demonstrably homeless, through no fault of their own, who are vulnerable in some way, and who are in priority need of housing. However, given that genuinely affordable housing is in such desperately short supply both in London and throughout the country, local authorities are too often faced with no choice but to place families in temporary accommodation while they wait for a suitable permanent home to become available.

In essence, amendment 104 addresses the situation for a family who are homeless and in need, when the local authority is doing what it has to do under the law to rehouse them, when there is not sufficient social housing for them to be rehoused so they must be rehoused in the private sector, and when the private sector rents are so high as to be on the other side of the cap. If we are really talking about fairness—perhaps we are not any more—and savings, what savings are we making? Is it not right to exempt such a family?

We are not talking about whether or not someone has deliberately refused to take a job. We are talking about a homeless family whom the local authority is obliged to rehouse. In boroughs such as mine—Islington—and increasingly in neighbouring boroughs, there is no private accommodation left where those homeless families can be housed on the other side of the benefit cap. If the benefit cap is brought down further, it will make the situation worse.

A woman who came to my surgery a couple of days ago to tell me about her temporary accommodation. She was put into temporary accommodation when pregnant. It was about to be bulldozed, but it was temporary. It has not been bulldozed. The child is now 16 months old and she is in a bedsit. That is the nature of the housing crisis in inner London. The amendment is, within that context, unexplained.

Families are put into temporary accommodation largely in the private sector. It is well established that temporary accommodation is generally leased by local authorities from the private sector at a premium, which means that a considerable financial burden is placed on councils. Private landlords know that the benefit cap is coming down and that more families will need to be rehoused—the families are desperate and the council is desperate to fulfil its duty. Guess what? The rents go up. That means yet more burden on local authorities.

One reason, as my hon. Friend has said, for people potentially being unable to work or to work for significant hours is caring responsibilities. She specifically mentioned carer’s allowance. Is she aware that to qualify for carer’s allowance, people need to be providing a minimum of 35 hours of support a week to a disabled person or other loved one? That is a definition that the Department for Work and Pensions’ own advice suggests is a “substantial” level of support to another individual.

So someone is supposed to give a substantial level of support to another person and yet also be working sufficiently to be exempted from the benefit cap. These are the sort of people who we rely on to keep our society going—frankly, most of them are likely to be women. Those people are carers for those who would otherwise be relying on the state to do it at a much greater cost. Instead recognising the role of such people, they are being penalised under draconian legislation.

If carers were to stop providing 35 hours of support or more a week, local authorities would potentially be asked to step in to provide some of that support to an individual. We already know what the Government’s agenda is for local authorities—what is has been for the past five years—but the average cost for care home placement is upwards of £600 a week. There could be a new cost to the Government of getting this policy wrong, particularly for carers.

My hon. Friend puts it very well. If only we had a Government that listened. In fact, the most recent statistical release from the Department included, for the first time, a breakdown of capped households by benefit claimed. By far the largest proportion—49%—were claiming income support. In the vast majority of cases those are single mothers who are unable to work because childcare is neither available nor affordable. It is clear from the evidence that we heard last week that a lack of suitable childcare remains a substantial barrier to lone parents seeking work.

In Islington in my borough the cost of a part-time nursery place is £235 a week—one of the highest in the country and more than 30% higher than the London average. It is not just cost that is the problem here. The jobs that are likely to be available to many of the mothers in my constituency who want to find work are disproportionately likely to be short-notice working, often at unsociable hours—in other words, the times when it is most difficult to find childcare.

The Government’s promise of raising the number of free hours of childcare to 30 hours a week is welcome, but we have been down this road before. During oral evidence we heard concerns to the effect that the shortfall between the reimbursement rate and the actual costs would make it uneconomical for many childcare providers to continue their operations. Neera Sharma stated:

“The Pre-school Learning Alliance has said that, on average, the cost of childcare is £4.53 an hour; the Government contributes, on average, £3.88. When the childcare offer is doubled, nurseries could operate at a loss of £661 per child per year, so there are going to be quite significant issues for providers.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 10 September 2015; c. 22, Q32.]

Order. May I just remind the hon. Lady about parliamentary language?

I am so sorry. How can it be consistent with what the Prime Minister said yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions? He said:

“I say that a family that chooses not to work should not be better off than one that chooses to work”?—[Official Report, 16 September 2015; Vol. 599, c. 1039.]

If that is the guiding principle behind the Bill, why is it that 85% of people affected by the cap are not in a position to work, and are recognised as such by the Minister’s very own Department? How is that right? I would really like an answer to that.

We should see this policy for what it is. It is just another form of financial penalty for people who the Government believe, in the absence of any evidence to support such a belief, are out of work through choice and not through simple misfortune. The figures suggest that in total, more than 90% of those currently affected by the benefit cap are out of work through no fault of their own. The Minister said during our debates on Tuesday:

“It is right that everyone who can work should work”.––[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2015; c. 144.]

Who would disagree with that? No one could disagree with that. That is the guiding principle behind the amendments, and for that reason I will press them.

I turn to amendment 107. I return to the point I touched on earlier about the evidence, or lack of it, to support the Government’s claim that the cap has been a successful tool in moving people into work. Let us probe Ministers’ oft-repeated claim that 41% of people have managed to remove themselves from the cap by finding employment. What the figures actually show is that 41% started making a claim for working tax credit, which is not quite the same thing, given that someone needs to be working for at least 16 hours a week to qualify. The Institute for Fiscal Studies explains:

“Some people may move into work but not work enough hours to be entitled to WTC”.

It goes on to say that others

“might start a WTC claim when they were in work all along, perhaps because claiming this entitlement is a relatively easy way of exempting oneself from the benefit cap.”

It is only “easy” for those who are already working.

What I find striking about the Government’s entire approach of arguing for the cap as a work incentive is their almost total complacency about the quality of work that people are moving into. Of those 41% of people now claiming working tax credit, it would be instructive to know how many of them are in temporary work or seasonal jobs, and how many have moved into work for short periods for that reason, only to fall back under the scope of the cap when work is no longer available.

It would help if we had figures on the number of people who have moved into work but who still have to claim benefits in order to pay for basic necessities, so that we know what the so-called “success” of the benefit cap is. A fact that is all too often left out of any discussion is that the majority of people claiming benefits are in work.

I certainly agree with the Government that it is not at all desirable for the state to be subsidising employers who fail to pay their staff a decent wage. The fault, however, is surely with employers and not the workers themselves. Ministers seem to have become accustomed to thinking that work is an end in itself, regardless of pay, conditions, security or anything else that matters to real people, whether they are in work or looking for it. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State wrote an extraordinary article in The Sunday Times, in which they stated:

“Helping those confined to the margins of our society by giving them the security and dignity of a job is a one nation government at work”.

Whether work offers security and dignity, however, very much depends on the job in question.

That brings me to amendment 107, which would provide for an exemption from the benefit cap for anyone who meets the definition of employment used by the Office for National Statistics. We have already heard, in relation to the reporting requirements for full employment in clause 1, that there are different ways of defining employment and that many of those bear little resemblance to the traditional concept of a nine-to-five job on a permanent contract, which would pay a family wage. Details of the exact measure of employment that is to be used for the purposes of the reporting requirement have yet to be fleshed out, but Ministers have given no indication that they will depart from the ONS definition, which suits their purposes in inflating the overall numbers.

If, however, someone can be employed under the Bill by working 20 minutes every fortnight and the idea of the benefit cap is to put people into work, why can people not do that? There is a contradiction: on the one hand we talk about 16 hours, but on the other hand we talk about any amount of work being sufficient.

It is strange, therefore, that the benefit cap, which is now more than ever being spun as a means to move people off benefits and into work, should set the bar so high in terms of what “work” means that anyone working for fewer hours than 16 hours a week will fail to meet the standard. Ministers seem perfectly happy with the ONS definition when it suits their purposes, but not when it does not. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If we are to believe Ministers when they say that the benefit cap is intended to move people into work, and that work is an end in itself, it ought not to be so loosely defined. It is wholly inconsistent for Ministers to oppose amendment 107. They simply cannot have it both ways, so I will press amendment 107 to a vote.

I will now move on to amendment 104. We have discussed a number of possible exemptions from the cap, which Ministers have opposed despite the fact that they seem entirely reasonable to me and to so many of the organisations that have sent briefings to the Committee. Amendment 104 takes a different approach, narrowing the number of exemptions to the groups that might be classed as the most acutely vulnerable and perhaps the least able to change their circumstances. The amendment would disapply the cap to single parents responsible for children under the age of two, people with full-time caring responsibilities and victims of domestic violence living in temporary accommodation.

Even in the event that Ministers reject the broader categories of exemption that I have suggested in the earlier amendments, surely amendment 104 will be difficult to vote against. Should people with young children who are living in temporary accommodation after fleeing domestic violence be affected by the cap? In a way, I suppose, the amendment is a form of challenge to the humanity of the Government Members. If welfare reform is meant to protect the most vulnerable, surely the Conservative party should be able to vote for the amendment.

My final point is about amendment 68, the David Cameron amendment—

Order. I think you mean the Prime Minister.

I am sorry. The Prime Minister amendment encapsulates the argument made by the Prime Minister. If the Bill is really about ensuring that families who have chosen not to work are affected by the benefit cap, surely we could encapsulate that quite simply and exempt jobseekers claiming jobseeker’s allowance who have not had a reasonable offer of employment. In other words, if someone on jobseeker’s allowance is offered a job—if they are fit to work, as defined by the DWP—and they do not accept it, there will be penalties in any event. We are talking only about that group of families, and the Prime Minister seemed only to be talking about that group of families at Prime Minister’s questions, so why do we not confine the Bill simply to that group? Why can we not encapsulate the purpose of the Bill in relation to the benefit cap as suggested in amendment 68—the David Cameron amendment?

I will be brief, as the hon. Lady has put her argument succinctly and extensively. [Interruption.] I do not have a huge amount to add, so I will keep my powder dry, so to speak. The Scottish National party supports the amendments, which would ensure that some of the most extremely vulnerable groups were not affected by the cap.

Frankly, the cap is a disgrace. The amendments acknowledge that those who claim benefits do so for a variety of reasons, from disability to mental health problems, abuse and homelessness, as well as unemployment. The blanket cap shows that the Government have no recognition of the complex psychological factors that can be wrapped up in what is not always a simple benefits claim. The Government are not thinking about the people, events and experiences that lie behind the figures on paper. The amendments would rightly pick up on those who may be hit the hardest, similar to my party’s own amendments, which we will discuss in the next group.

Do any Back Benchers wish to speak?

Briefly Mr Owen. Thank you for your generosity earlier and for preventing me from being put in the same position again.

The derogatory comments about the succinctness of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury demonstrate the big difference between the Government and the Opposition. These are incredibly important issues that affect thousands of people, and they go directly to the root of the matter. The Government claim to represent working people, but many thousands of the people affected are in work. The Government are taking away fundamental parts of the support system that helps those on low incomes who are trying to work, move on and do the right thing, to use the Government’s terminology. The Government are also undermining people’s opportunity to live in central London constituencies such as mine.

I want to pre-empt something that I suspect the Minister might say about discretionary housing payments. Rather than just focusing on the few local authorities that pass back, or have passed back, some of their unspent discretionary housing payments, perhaps we could discuss the total spend of councils on discretionary housing payments, including those, such as mine, that spend more than they are provided by central Government.

The amendments would introduce a new series of exemptions from the benefit cap. Largely, they would provide exemptions for the households that find it most difficult to enter work, for people who may be unable to get a job or for those who are not required to be available for work and to take up employment. I will shortly address why I do not agree with introducing the proposed additional exemptions, but I remind Members that the cap sets out the strong principle that there is a maximum level of out-of-work benefits that the Government will pay to each household. The Government have always accepted that there should be some exemptions from the benefit cap.

I will briefly recap the current exemptions. To incentivise work, the cap does not apply to households in receipt of working tax credits. To recognise the extra costs that disability can bring, households that include a member who is in receipt of attendance allowance, disability living allowance, personal independence payment or the support component of employment and support allowance are exempt. War widows and widowers are also exempt, as I am sure all Members recognise.

Has any assessment been made of the impact of the benefit cap and other changes on new applications for the supports just listed by the Minister that provide an exemption from the cap?

I will have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on that point.

The exemptions best support the cap’s aims of increasing incentives to work and promoting fairness while ensuring that the vulnerable remain supported. The welfare reforms that we have discussed thus far in Committee are about transforming life chances and promoting fairness and opportunity.

Amendment 104 would introduce three new exemptions from the benefit cap. The explanatory statement that accompanied the amendment explains that its purpose is:

“To provide that the benefit cap does not apply to benefit claimants who will find it most difficult to enter work.”

The first exemption that the amendment would introduce is for persons

“responsible for the care of a child aged below 2”.

A blanket description that couples with children are those who find it most difficult to enter work is inappropriate. The vast majority of capped households who have found work include parents who have managed to balance their caring responsibilities with work, as millions of working households already do. By going out to work, parents are helping to improve their children’s life chances and are showing them the importance of a strong work ethic, reinforcing the principle that work is the best way out of poverty.

Turning to lone parents with young children, at whom I think this amendment is most likely addressed, we believe that work is the best route out of poverty for households. Children can have their life chances and opportunities damaged by living in households in which no one has worked for years and in which no one considers work as an option. Lone parents need only enter work at 16 hours a week to become eligible for working tax credits and so become exempt from the cap.

We already provide support to parents for the cost of childcare, which we are extending to help working parents further. The 30 hours of free childcare is just one measure, but there are many others, not least tax-free childcare, which will provide a great deal of support, in particular for families on universal credit, who will be able to claim back 70% of childcare costs. On funding for childcare rates, a Government funding review is currently under way, led by the Department for Education, so more is taking place in this area. Parents who receive help with childcare costs through working tax credits are exempt from the cap and childcare costs paid through UC are excluded from the cap. Since the cap was introduced in April 2013, nearly 8,500 lone parents have moved into work and started claiming working tax credits. In 2014, around 1.25 million lone parents were in employment in the UK.

The second exemption that the amendment would introduce is for people in receipt of carer’s allowance in respect of someone who is in receipt of disability living allowance, personal independence payment or attendance allowance with whom they are not living. We all acknowledge the important role that carers provide, but we do not accept that carers are unable to work. Although seeking work is not a condition for receiving carer’s allowance, many carers are nevertheless able to and combine work with caring responsibilities. Figures from February this year show that around 760,000 working-age claimants were receiving carer’s allowance. Of those, around 75,000 reported that they were doing work at some point while making their claim. It would therefore be inappropriate to introduce an exemption specifically on the grounds that somebody is in receipt of carer’s allowance. However, the vast majority—94%—of households in receipt of carer’s allowance who have a benefit income above the cap level are exempt from the cap, mainly because the person they care for is in the same household and is in receipt of an exempting disability-related benefit.

If so few households are affected and if the justification is fairness—although I am not sure about that—why not allow the exemption? If it would save money, because it relates to so little money, why not exempt such people?

I will carry on. I may pick up some of the points made later.

The final part of the amendment would exempt those living in temporary accommodation following an incident of domestic abuse. The effects of domestic abuse are awful and traumatic; no one could ever argue to the contrary. That is why we have introduced a series of measures to support those who have been subject to domestic abuse, including easements for prescribed periods of time from any requirements to look for or take work. We have special provisions within the cap to help those who have had to flee their homes and seek sanctuary in refuges.

Before the cap was implemented, we amended the regulations so that any housing support paid for people living in what was then termed exempt accommodation should be excluded from the cap. When concerns were raised that the definition of exempt accommodation was too narrow, we amended regulations to ensure that housing support paid to those living in a refuge, for example, as a consequence of domestic abuse would also be covered by the exclusion.

Amendment 67 would require an exemption for those living in temporary accommodation. We do not agree that the best way to help people in temporary accommodation is merely to exempt them from the benefit cap. We believe that the best way is to support people to overcome the barriers and issues that they might face, including the barriers to work. We cannot see why we would want to exclude all households in temporary accommodation from the positive effects of support to get back to work.

Surely the best and in fact the only way of helping people out of temporary accommodation is to build more housing.

I support the hon. Lady’s comment. That is exactly what the Government’s policy is, and we are doing so.

Although we recognise that rents in temporary accommodation can be high, local authorities have a duty under homelessness legislation to provide suitable, affordable accommodation where the applicant is deemed to be in priority need. Before the cap was implemented, we amended regulations so that any housing support paid for people living in what was termed exempt accommodation should be excluded from the cap. When concerns were raised that the definition was too narrow, we further amended regulations to ensure that housing support paid to those living in refuges would be covered by the exclusion.

Amendment 69 would exempt those in receipt of carer’s allowance. I have already set out the reasons why we do not think the exemption would be appropriate. The amendment also exempts those on employment and support allowance. As I have said, we have already exempted those on ESA who are in receipt of the support component, recognising that they have particular health conditions and are far removed from the labour market and less likely to be able to increase their income.

As discussed—I think that all Members have commented—the benefit cap is a work incentive. Those in the work-related activity group of employment and support allowance have been assessed and are being supported into work, which we believe is right. More recently, we have announced a funding package of up to £100 million a year in the Budget to provide the right incentives and support to enable those with limited capability but some potential to prepare for work. That relates to those within the work-related activity component of ESA.

We are currently in the latter stages of re-assessing recipients of severe disablement allowance and incapacity benefit who are below pension age to see whether they are entitled to employment support allowance and qualify for the work-related activity group or the support group. Those reforms will ensure that such individuals are supported in their engagement with the labour market, or given whatever support they need. More than 1.4 million of those on incapacity benefits have started the reassessment process since it began, and almost 750,000 of them are being supported to prepare or look for work as a result of the ESA process.

Amendment 72 is consequential on amendment 69, to which I have just spoken. The amendment would omit carer’s allowance, employment and support allowance, incapacity benefit, income support and severe disablement allowance from the list of welfare benefits. I have set out why we do not think that that is appropriate; I return to the principles of the benefit cap.

Amendment 70 relates to exempting those in receipt of universal credit without any work requirements. Before addressing this amendment, I remind Committee members that there is an exemption from the cap for those who are entitled to the universal credit limited capability for work or work-related activity element whose health conditions mean that they are further from the labour market and less able to increase their income through work.

I do not think there is anything else I need to say. I am very disappointed by some of the responses. I will not press amendment 107, but I shall press amendment 104 to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

I beg to move amendment 28, in clause 7, page 9, line 9, leave out paragraph (a).

This amendment would remove bereavement allowance from the benefit cap.

With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 29, in clause 7, page 9, line 11, leave out paragraph (b).

This amendment would remove carer’s allowance from the benefit cap.

Amendment 30, in clause 7, page 9, line 13, leave out paragraph (c).

This amendment would remove child benefit from the benefit cap.

Amendment 31, in clause 7, page 9, line 15, leave out paragraph (d).

This amendment would remove child tax credit from the benefit cap.

Amendment 32, in clause 7, page 9, line 21, leave out paragraph (f).

This amendment would remove guardian’s allowance from the benefit cap.

Amendment 76, in clause 7, page 9, line 23, leave out paragraph (g).

This amendment would remove housing benefit from the benefit cap.

Amendment 33, in clause 7, page 9, line 33, leave out paragraph (k).

This amendment would remove maternity allowance from the benefit cap.

Amendment 34, in clause 7, page 9, line 35, leave out paragraph (l).

This amendment would remove severe disablement allowance from the benefit cap.

Amendment 35, in clause 7, page 9, line 38, leave out paragraph (n).

This amendment would remove widow’s pension from the benefit cap.

Amendment 36, in clause 7, page 9, line 40, leave out paragraph (o).

This amendment would remove widowed mother’s allowance from the benefit cap.

Amendment 37, in clause 7, page 9, line 42, leave out paragraph (p).

This amendment would remove widowed parent’s allowance from the benefit cap.

With our amendments in this group, we hope to remove some of the most vulnerable groups that will be included in this benefit cap: people on bereavement allowance; people on carer’s allowance; people on child benefit and child tax credit; people on guardian’s allowance; people on maternity allowance; and people on severe disablement allowance. All those people should be excluded from the cap.

Amendment 28 would remove the bereavement allowance from the cap. Bereavement allowance can be a lifeline for those who suffer after the death of a spouse. As well as helping people to cope with the huge amount of emotional distress that that can cause both before and after death, bereavement allowance helps people to get back on their feet and cope with the potential loss of income caused by their spouse’s death. For the same reason, we have tabled amendments 35, 36 and 37, which would remove benefits from the cap that those who have been widowed are entitled to.

Amendment 29 would remove carer’s allowance from the cap, because it is important that carers are not penalised by the benefit cap. Those who dedicate huge proportions of their day to caring for a loved one, regardless of whether they live with them or not, should not be punished by the Government for their selflessness and dedication.

As Carers UK has pointed out, the Government’s welfare policy is trying to incentivise people into work, but many carers are not in a position to work or take on more work without reducing the care that they provide to loved ones. Increasing financial pressure on carers could have an adverse effect on the people they care for, not to mention the potential psychological burdens, and it would put greater pressure on our local authorities and third sector, which are already under significant pressure due to the cut in the block grant to Scotland. Amendments 30 and 31 would remove child tax benefit and child tax credit from the benefit cap, and amendment 32 would remove the guardian’s allowance from the cap.

Just because the Government have decided to abolish the definition of child poverty does not mean that they have abolished the reality of 3.7 million children in the UK living in relative poverty. That number is projected to rise to 4.7 million by 2012 under current Government policies. Capping those benefits will only push into hardship more children who have no ability to do anything about their circumstances. That would have both short-term and long-term effects for their health, emotional wellbeing and educational achievement. In the case of the guardian’s allowance, a child and a guardian who have already had to cope with the death of a loved one must be protected from the burden of financial hardship falling on them, on top of their loss.

Amendment 33 would remove maternity allowance from the cap to ensure that a woman will not be penalised merely because she has decided to have a child. Amendment 44 would remove the severe disablement allowance from the cap. Although we understand this benefit is undergoing a transition, for those who are still receiving it, it provides extra support for those with particularly severe disabilities. Once again, the effect the cap will have on disabled people claiming benefit will be hugely damaging: not simply because of the inclusion of this benefit in the cap, but the inclusion of many benefits that some disabled people rely on to live life independently.

I would like to talk to amendment 76, but in doing so perhaps offer a critique of the SNP’s amendments. The important thing is that there is a difference between the amendments that have been tabled so far, which would exclude groups, so that if someone is in receipt of a particular benefit, the group would be excluded, but if a particular benefit is to be excluded from the benefit cap, the cap could still hit that group in any event. Let me explain a little better. Take, for example, the bereavement allowance to be excluded from the benefit cap. It would not mean excluding that group because if someone who was bereaved had other benefits that took them on to the other side of the benefit cap, they would still be affected by the cap, despite the bereavement allowance. For my party, it is important to look at the groups as opposed to the benefits. I will throw that into relief in relation to housing benefit.

The housing benefit amendment has been tabled as a probing amendment, but in truth the reason that the cap is even considered is because of the high cost of housing. So if any benefit was to be excluded from the benefit cap, it would be housing. It is housing that causes the so-called trouble. Some people have large families. The Government want to push the benefit gap down even further, but the issue is not even about large families. It can be families that need only two or three bedrooms in some areas, and there will not be a single area in the country that will not be affected by the benefit cap, because of the amount of money that housing costs. So if any benefit were to be excluded, it should be housing benefit, because that is the essence of the costs. If we look at fairness, it really is not the fault of someone who has a larger family who needs to live in a two, three or four-bedroom flat, or someone who lives in a more expensive area. Housing costs could be taken out of the equation when it comes to benefit caps.

The Government are always saying it is not fair for someone on benefits to be receiving more than the average earnings, but of course it is not they who get the money; it is their landlords. It is because the landlords want to be able to accept more money from the state that the rents continue to go up. That is what the amendment highlights. In the end, we are talking about there not being enough affordable housing in this country, either in London or across the country. The benefit caps that have been introduced so far have adversely affected London and large families within London, but the new benefit cap suggested in the Bill of £23,000 or £21,000 will affect families throughout the entire country.

I refer the Committee to the evidence that was given to us by Shelter, I believe. Shelter said that under the new cap a family with four children would be unable to find a home with the number of bedrooms that they need anywhere in England. That is important—nowhere in England without hitting the benefit cap.

The size of the shortfall is also remarkable. The cheapest place to rent the four-bedroom home that the family would need is Bradford, where a home at the lower end of the market costs £123 a week. Even there, a family would face a shortfall of £81 a week. The problem is not only a London one. The way in which the Government are going about introducing the benefit cap and pushing it down and down will affect families throughout the country, including in the constituencies of Conservative Members.

The issue is important. Some people might have been tempted to think that there are Londoners who believe that they should continue to live in London, even though house prices are going up, and that frankly we should leave it to the Russian oligarchs to live in central London and the rest of us ought to move somewhere else. The truth, however, is that there will be nowhere else in the country where a family can live without being affected by the benefit cap—unless we take housing costs out of the cap.

If we take housing costs out and look at the needs of families, we might find that there would not be the same regional variation as we have at the moment. The reason for the variation is the varying housing costs, so the amendment probes that issue. Perhaps the Government will consider the kernel of truth, that the poorest people in this country are being penalised by the Bill and the benefit cap for something that is not their fault; frankly, it is the fault of generations of politicians, Labour and Conservative, who have not built enough affordable housing. It is not the fault of those in my constituency with a family of two living in private rented accommodation that prices are so high. It is not the fault of the family of four in Bradford that house prices will be on the other side of the cap. It is our fault for not ensuring sufficient affordable housing.

I know that the Minister will get up and tell us that the Government are building lots of affordable housing—well get on and build it! Once they have built it, they will not need to have the benefit cap, because people will be able to live on reasonable amounts of money, which will save the country a great deal of money. The time was when Governments used to spend, for every £10 spent on building homes, £1 on benefits that would assist people to live. Now the whole thing is tipped on to its head, so that for every £1 we spend on building homes, we spend £10 on housing benefit.

The answer could be, “Let’s just cut housing benefit! Let’s not let people have enough money to pay rent.” We could do it that way, but that would be draconian, inhumane, cruel and wrong. The other way to do it would be to spend the money on building affordable homes—truly large amounts of affordable homes. We need radical solutions for such a profound problem. The solution is not to turn on the poorest and most marginalised people in this country; the solution is to build more affordable homes and to go for it. If the Government were to do that, they would have the complete support of the Opposition. That is true affordable homes, not the nonsense affordable homes dreamt up for the Greater London Authority by the Mayor of London, with 80% market rent somehow or other an affordable home. We want real affordable homes that cost a reasonable amount of money and that people can genuinely afford to live in.

That in essence is the solution to the problem and what is highlighted in the amendment. I ask the Minister to address herself to the issue raised by the amendment.

I will not run through the various exemptions called for in the amendments. I will come on to housing shortly, because I will basically rerun some of the points that have been made previously.

The amendments would omit various welfare benefits from those that are currently within the benefit cap. We believe that the current exemptions are the best ones to support our aims of increasing incentives to work and fairness, and to support the most vulnerable.

In our last sitting, we spoke about support for carers and about carers balancing the needs of their care and work responsibilities. I appreciate that the hon. Lady has called for a wide range of amendments to omit child benefit, child tax credit and guardian’s allowance from the benefit cap.

I have a question for the Minister and I would be grateful if she were able to answer it, perhaps with the assistance of her officials. I believe she said that many carers combine work with caring responsibilities, but people can claim carer’s allowance only if their caring responsibilities take up more than 35 hours a week. To work enough hours to exempt themselves from the cap, they would need effectively to work 51 hours a week. If that is right, does she accept that that would be an inappropriate amount of time for people to be working in order to be exempted from the cap?

I put that in the context of the some of the other benefits within the household, which would therefore exempt the carer from the benefit cap.

The hon. Lady calls for a range of exemptions. She will not be surprised—I made the point on the previous group of amendments—that we believe that, to incentivise work, the cap does not apply to those households in receipt of working tax credits. We outlined a range of exemptions in the last sitting when we discussed the previous group of amendments.

The hon. Lady touched on the only area on which there is a degree of consensus on the Bill and in the debate: the role of housing. She spoke to amendment 76, which would remove housing benefit from the benefit cap. I understand it to mean not that households in receipt of housing benefit would be exempt from the cap, but that their housing benefit payment would be disregarded from the calculation of the total household benefits to which they are subject. The removal of housing benefit from the benefits that are subject to the cap would simply undermine the principle of the cap.

Exactly.

As the hon. Lady and other hon. Members know, housing benefit is usually the single largest benefit, therefore the cap would no longer have the intended effect of limiting high levels of total benefits.

In addition, the amendment does not refer to housing costs in relation to universal credit. It would therefore mean different treatment for households in receipt of housing benefit and those on universal credit, which is surely not the intention. The inclusion of housing benefit in the cap is specific to the principles of the cap. Obviously the Government support it through discretionary housing payments, for example. As we discussed earlier, there is now more funding for those payments. As I said, we have announced additional funding that will continue, with £800 million being made available for discretionary housing payments over the next five years. Given that, it would not be right to exclude housing benefit from the cap.

The hon. Lady was right—I am going to make the point that more is being done on building homes. That is not for the Bill, because it is not for the Department for Work and Pensions, but building homes is about the Government working with local authorities to focus on doing more in that space. There is no doubt that we all want more affordable housing. The Government have so far committed £38 billion of both public and private investment to help to ensure that 275,000 new affordable homes are built between now and 2020.

The hon. Lady pointed out that we need to get on with it. That is exactly what we are committed to do. I ask local authorities to work with us to achieve that common aim. That is fundamental to supporting people not just in respect of housing need, but in respect of giving them a quality of life. That is right and proper. It is also fundamental to dealing with the issues of rent, housing costs in general and homes standards, which have also been aired in the debate.

Because we have touched on many of the exemptions in debates on previous clauses, I will not rehearse them. Given that we have a vast number of exemptions from the benefit cap, it would not be appropriate or right to extend them to the exemptions proposed in this group of amendments, so I urge hon. Members not to press them.

I would like to respond to the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury. As she well knows, these amendments are only a compromise on our earlier amendments, on which I am glad that the Labour party was able to join the SNP. The amendments would ring-fence individual benefits, so that those in receipt would be specifically protected to mitigate their circumstances.

I hear what the hon. Lady says about housing, which is a devolved matter. The Scottish Government have met their targets for building affordable housing. This is about progressive politics. We have picked up the mantle and have filled the gap left for us by previous Scottish Administrations and the Westminster Government, and we have driven forward an ambitious house-building programme within our limited financial framework. With all that in mind, I want to press amendments 28 to 37 to a vote.

I thank the hon. Lady for that forewarning. We will deal with amendment 28 first and then with the rest of the group.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

I beg to move amendment 88, in clause 7, page 9, line 43, at end insert—

“(4A) Subsection (11) (benefits that regulations may not prescribe as welfare benefits) is omitted.”

This amendment to omit section 96(11) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 is consequential on the amendment of the definition of “welfare benefit” in section 96(10) by clause 7(4).

With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendments 89 and 90.

Government amendment 88 simply tidies up the existing legislation. Section 96(11) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 refers to regulations under subsection (10). As regulations will no longer be made under subsection (10), the reference is obsolete and needs to be removed. Amendment 88 inserts a new subsection (4A) into clause 7 to achieve that.

Amendment 89 is consequential on that, removing a reference to section 96(11) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 from schedule 12 to the Pensions Act 2014 by inserting a new subsection (5A) into clause 7. To be clear, there is no change to the benefits that are subject to the cap. Indeed, the provisions in the Bill move the list of capped benefits into primary legislation, providing greater certainty as to the extent of the cap. The benefit cap applies to working-age benefits. Retirement benefits are not subject to the cap.

Amendment 90 is a technical amendment to clause 7(6), which allows us to put in place, if needed, transitional provisions that will support a phased introduction of the changes we are making to the benefit cap. The amendment extends those transitional provisions to subsection (4) and the new subsections (4A) and (5A). It is necessary to ensure that the cap is rolled out effectively in a way that works for everybody.

We continue to develop our implementation plans for the new benefit cap, and we will work with key partners in doing so. We want to repeat the success we had when we originally rolled out the cap, so we will be working closely with Jobcentre Plus and local authorities to ensure a joined-up delivery approach, which previously provided claimants with notice and support, enabling them to respond to the cap and move into employment. The amendment will give us the flexibility to develop and deliver an implementation plan that achieves the aims of the cap, meets the needs of delivery partners and provides the appropriate supports for claimants.

Amendment 88 agreed to.

Amendments made: 89, in clause 7, page 9, line 45, at end insert—

‘(5A) Paragraph 52 of Schedule 12 to the Pensions Act 2014 is omitted.”.

This amendment provides for the repeal of provision amending section 96(11) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and is consequential on amendment 88.

Amendment 90, in clause 7, page 10, line 2, leave out “and (3)” and insert “to (4A) and (5A)”.—(Priti Patel.)

This amendment enables transitional provision under clause 7(6) to disregard the effect on section 96 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 of the amendments made by clause 7(4) and clause 7(4A) and (5A), added by amendments 88 and 89.

Question put, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

I beg to move amendment 12, in clause 8, page 10, line 22, leave out “in each Parliament” and insert “a year”.

To require the Secretary of State to review the level of the benefit cap every year to determine whether it is appropriate to change the level of the cap.

With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 1—Report on impact of benefit cap reductions—

“(1) The Secretary of State must publish and lay before Parliament before the end of the financial year ending with 31 March 2017 a report on the impact of the benefit cap reductions introduced by this Bill.

(2) The report must include an assessment of the impact on each of the measures of child poverty defined in the Child Poverty Act 2010.”

This new clause requires the Secretary of State to review impact of lower benefit cap after 12 months.

Amendment 12 would leave out the provision that the benefit cap should be reviewed in each Parliament and instead state that it should be reviewed each year. The reason for that is obvious. We hear from the Government all the time about how well they are doing, how many people are getting into work and how well the economy is doing. If all of that is true, the level of inflation may well go up. For that reason, it seems entirely reasonable, responsible and fair to review the benefit cap every year. There has been a tradition of benefits being reviewed every year. The amendment would be consistent with what has been settled practice in terms of fairness in the past. If the benefit cap really is about fairness, surely there should be no problem with ensuring that the benefit cap is reviewed each year instead of in each Parliament.

That brings me to new clause 1, which states that the Secretary of State must report to Parliament by 31 March 2017 on the impact of the benefit cap reductions introduced in the Bill and that the report must include an assessment of the impact on each measure of child poverty, as defined by the Child Poverty Act 2010. That takes us back to the mantra that Ministers will hear throughout the parliamentary debate on this Bill, which is evidence, evidence, evidence. Not prejudice, not Daily Mail headlines but evidence.

If the alleged high-minded principles behind the Bill are a true ambition, the Government will not be frightened of an assessment to ensure that they are not being cruel, or randomly dishing out unfairness, but are truly pursuing the policies they claim to be trying to promote. If they are truly confident that their ambitions will be fulfilled as a result of the Bill, they will not run away from new clause 1 but embrace it. As they come up to the next general election, they will want to say, “Thanks to the Labour party, we have been able to measure the real success of our Bill. We have not been unfair on anyone. Everyone is back in work. Look at the way in which the streets of London flow with milk and honey.” Indeed, we will support them, and applaud them, if what they say they want to do really happens, but we will not know what has happened, other than from the weeping people coming into our surgeries, if we do not measure it properly.

The Government have resources to measure this properly, so why run away? Why not go ahead and measure the so-called success that will result from the Bill? If the Government are not prepared to measure it, those watching the debate will know that the reason they do not want to measure it is because they know what is really going to happen: the poor are going to get poorer. The Government are picking on the poorest in order to pay off the deficit, which is unfair.

This group contains two proposals. As we have heard, amendment 12 would introduce a requirement for the Secretary of State to review the level of the benefit cap annually, and new clause 1 would require the Secretary of State to publish and lay before Parliament a report on the impact of the changes.

On amendment 12, the Bill requires the Secretary of State to review the level of the cap at least once in every Parliament, but it also provides him with powers to review the benefit cap at any other time he considers appropriate. That provides the most effective means of ensuring that the cap stays at the appropriate level while providing the stability that households on benefits require. The cap’s current provisions require the level to be reviewed annually, but that is specifically to review the relationship with average earnings, on which the level of the current cap is based. To date, there has been no need to change the level of the cap following those annual reviews.

Earlier, we touched on some of the evidence showing that households affected by the cap are 41% more likely to go into work. Our provisions already include powers allowing the Secretary of State, if appropriate, to review the cap at any time in the Parliament, which means that the Government will not be constrained from reviewing the cap, particularly in light of any significant economic events. The clause, as drafted, will therefore provide a sufficient safeguard, and the level of the cap remains at the appropriate level.

On new clause 1, during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act 2012, the Government committed to a full evaluation of the benefit cap to explore its effectiveness. The then Minister with responsibility for employment announced that DWP would publish a review of the cap after its first year of operation. The review was published in December 2014 and explored the progress from policy development to implementation and delivery. The report evaluated the effectiveness of three specific aims that underpinned the introduction of the benefit cap. These were to focus on work incentives, introduce greater fairness and, of course, to make the system more affordable by encouraging positive support for individuals who needed it, particularly in getting back to work.

The cap has been in place for about two years, and evidence shows that it has been successful. We intend to build on that success. Since its introduction, more than 16,000 capped households have moved into work. As I mentioned, capped households are more likely to go into work than those that are uncapped. This has been achieved without a legislative requirement for reports and evaluations. We do not feel that it is necessary to commit in legislation to delivering any future evaluations. We have not decided on approaches yet but, as before, an evaluation of the new cap would be most appropriate after implementation, when we can see the cap’s full effect and the behavioural changes it causes, and they can be reviewed accordingly.

The Government’s record on providing a review of the cap should be recognised. Also, a number of independently commissioned pieces of research and analysis, peer reviewed by a range of organisations, has been published. That, with the introduction of the life chances measures, means that, contrary to what is suggested in the amendment, we do not need legislation to report on the impact of the benefit cap. I urge the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury to withdraw the amendment.