Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 25 in this group. Before I do so, I apologise to your Lordships for my overenthusiasm on Monday in Committee. I am afraid that I spoke too often and at too great a length, and therefore contributed substantially to the delay that day. I will seek to be shorter today. I have an amendment in this group and two or three in the next group, so please bear with me.

Amendment 25 would reintroduce into the Bill the four measures of child poverty that were introduced in the Child Poverty Act 2010. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, and regret with him that so much of that Act is being taken away by the Bill. I am concerned that this is a pattern one sees over the years: one Government come in and often undo the good work of the preceding Government. I am attracted to the approach Finland took towards its education system. Some years ago it began to be concerned about the quality of its education system, and a cross-party consensus was built that what was most important was to recruit and retain the best teachers and raise their status. Some 15 years down the line, it has the best-performing education system in the world. Therefore, in these important issues there is a lot to be said for building on the best of what is produced by whatever Government and not simply taking away what was put in place before.

The first time I met the noble Lord, Lord Freud, he was just publishing or launching his report for the Labour Government into improving employment. He has a very single-minded and focused passion to get more people in this country into work and is a supreme advocate of the value and importance of work not only to the nation and its economy but to its individual citizens. It was my privilege to work with the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on the education legislation coming through, and he in his turn is very focused on improving education incomes, principally through developing more academies. I pay tribute to the huge success the Government have had in getting more of our people into work in this difficult time. I make these points because I hope that the Minister might be prepared to be broad-minded and embrace other approaches which might help him to achieve the outcomes he wishes to achieve.

I read with great interest the speech of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to his party conference, when he spoke about the importance of social justice and social mobility and in particular about looked-after children and improving their outcomes. I suggest that the Government may be missing a trick here. Yes—more work and improving educational outcomes are important. However, a very important contribution to both of those is to address income poverty. A child attending school who has not eaten the night before or had breakfast may well find it hard to do well at school. If there is not the transport to enable families to see each other and keep connections, they may well suffer from isolation or mental ill health and the family can decline. If these measures were reinstated in the Bill, that would help the Government with regard to their aims on social mobility.

The Minister may wish to refer to the letter from the Children’s Commissioners for the UK, which was copied to me. The Children’s Commissioners of the UK—for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland—wrote to the Minister supporting this amendment on reintroducing the measuring of child poverty, and they made a very powerful case. I look forward to the Minister’s response and I hope that he can be sympathetic. From our previous discussions, and from listening to his response at Second Reading, I have the sense that he is strongly opposed to these proposals but I hope that perhaps, on reflection, he might be able to see that this will enrich and support what he proposes and not be a hindrance to it.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise that I was not able to speak at Second Reading. Had I done so, I would have focused in particular on the measurement of child poverty. I passionately believe that any Government who are concerned about this issue need to know what its extent is, and whether it is going up or down. Therefore, why on earth abandon the long-established measurements that have been adopted, not only in this country but by many other bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank? It is an internationally recognised approach to the measurement of poverty. I support the amendments in this group and very much support the arguments made by my noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and those of the other two speakers who have already contributed.

I begin by asking the Minister why the Government have wilfully ignored the responses to the consultation launched by the coalition Government, of which the Conservative Party was the leading partner. I want to quote from a Child Poverty Action Group document which sets out the responses to that consultation—I think that they became public as a result of a freedom of information request. Some 97% of respondents believed that all the targets under the Child Poverty Act 2010 ought to be retained. Only 8% of respondents believed that new measures were needed to replace the current ones. Some 90% of respondents believed that income should be included in a measure of poverty, and only 1% believed that it should not be included. Some 97% of respondents believed that income is an important or very important dimension of poverty. In responses to a consultation document, you rarely get such enormously high proportions wishing to continue with something whose abolition the Government are consulting on, so I would like the Minister to say why the Government have ignored those responses. As I said earlier, the measures are based on very extensive work, and the Royal Statistical Society has always described them as the product of very valid social science procedures. I have already stressed their international aspect and their comparability with what is happening in other countries. That is my first question to the Minister.

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[Lord Freud]

I can only provide the noble Baroness with these relative statistics on what is happening—where the risks for being in poverty are much higher when you are entirely workless. Clearly, as we look at our statistics for the workless, we will have quite a lot of analysis behind what is really happening there.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, would the Minister agree that most of those who have taken part in this debate have no objection to collecting information about worklessness or work as it affects those in relatively low-income groups? That is not what we are arguing about. What we are asking the Government to do is to go on counting the number of children who are living in poverty, whether their parents are in work or not in work.

The bewilderment about this that I expressed earlier is now somewhat reduced, because I think I understand why the Government do not wish to go on collecting this information—even though it is entirely wrong not to, because if you want to get rid of something or end it, you count it, otherwise you do not know where the hell you are. I think it is because of something he revealed earlier, which is that the Government do not want to have targets. I can see why the Government may not want to have targets, because it is often difficult to meet them, as we have seen in a lot of other areas, for example with the migration statistics. However, I am not asking that the Government necessarily stick to having targets. What I am asking, and what everyone else who has spoken in this debate, with the exception of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, wants, is that we retain proper, basic information—which any good Government who are concerned with evidence when developing their policies must have—on how many children, whether their parents are in work or not, are living in poverty. That is all we are asking for. Why are the Government not prepared to do this? Abandon the targets if you like, or do not call them targets, but do the measurements.

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[Lord Freud]

In practice, that is not the case. There are two sets of amendments in this group and Amendment 46 from the Opposition deals with the targets so I must deal with both issues. That is what I have been trying to do. I hear around the Chamber that more noble Lords are concerned about measures than targets.

In reality, there is only one word between us: statutory. I made a commitment that we will go on publishing HBAI and that is a protected position. Let me just explain how that works. The HBAI is a national statistic. That means that it complies with the code of practice for official statistics, which states that it must be produced independently of political influence. Any changes to HBAI in future would therefore be made only following the judgment of the head of profession for statistics in the Department for Work and Pensions. Any such changes would be subject to formal consultation with users, as required under the code of practice for official statistics. I think I am on reasonably safe ground in assuring noble Lords that we currently gather HBAI with a full documentary analysis. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I have that on paper in front of me or on my shelf. That has on it not only the Excel tables but also a clear commentary. By implication, I am saying that that will go on being published in a similar format.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, though the Minister makes a commitment, will he accept that, as is so often said in this House, if there is no statutory requirement and nothing on the statute book any one of his successors could abandon that commitment? That is why we who have concerns about children in poverty want this measure to go on being collected and to be done under statute.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

I agree that we should have this in legislation but can the Minister confirm that his personal commitment will cover the circumstances and the work that needs to be done to identify whether somebody is experiencing material deprivation? That is not just an income issue.