Socioeconomic Equality Duty

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, I should like to ask the Minister some questions about points that she has raised today and about what her right honourable friend said at the reception. Her right honourable friend cited as a reason for getting rid of the duty the fact that public sector spending is skewed towards certain parts of the country. I do not know what that means. I could understand its meaning if she was referring to certain parts of communities, but I do not know what is meant by certain parts of the country. She then went on to refer to bin collections and bus service redesign. Neither of those things has anything to do with equality. The socioeconomic duty would help to meet that practical need, whereas talking about dustbins and buses has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Statement referred to compensating measures to make up for the drastic cuts in benefits and services. For some, that might sound like big and impressive figures. However, I should like to quote again from the comments of the End Child Poverty campaign, which identified many of the things that the Minister talked about. It said:

“The compensating measures don’t go nearly far enough to stop this being a dark day for any family struggling to stay out of poverty”.

It also talked about householders falling behind. My goodness, a lot more of them will be falling behind. The socioeconomic duty is even more important as a result of the cuts that are coming.

I have another question regarding the sums available. Will those be ring-fenced? How will the Government ensure that they go to the poorest families? What process will make that happen? It is a key part of the Statement.

I am fully in favour of the concept of increasing flexible working—I would not disagree with that one iota. However, many more families will need support, because a large number of them will be unemployed. As for the half-million unemployed public sector workers, I have no doubt the Minister will say that many of them will go into private sector jobs. However, PricewaterhouseCoopers has warned that almost half a million private sector jobs could be lost as a result of the spending squeeze. Are we talking about more families in need of support? The socioeconomic duty would have been invaluable in helping to ensure that support went to the right people.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

Perhaps I may remind noble Lords to make their comments as brief as possible so that we can fit in as many people as possible.

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks a lot of questions and I am not sure that I will be able to answer them all. We are looking at how we can manage the budget deficit so that the most vulnerable are least of all affected. That is why we have taken 880,000 people out of the tax system altogether and that is why we are introducing increased child tax credits for the poorest families to mitigate some of the things that they are going to have to face, because for the 13 years that the party opposite was in government poverty increased. We did see an increase in the numbers. So I am sorry to say that this is not an issue on which the party opposite can boast, say that they addressed it and that we are not now addressing it. We are all trying to address this serious problem.

We supported the Child Poverty Act and we were committed to implementing it. The Labour Government repeatedly missed their targets. It is very easy to sit here and say that what we are doing is gesture politics and that what the previous Government did was right. What we have to take on board is that we have huge deficits that we must respond to. We have a duty to support the most vulnerable people and we as a Government take that very seriously. In her speech yesterday morning, my noble friend pointed out that local authorities are best placed to know where and how to spend their resources. They are best placed to know how to react to the needs of their local communities. I do not think that we need a diktat from central government through some clause that will force local authorities into a tick-box bureaucracy that, to be truthful, does not answer any of those questions.