Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Lord Bird

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Amendment 163 in my name would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets and report on them annually to Parliament. This amendment will hold the Government to their promise to reduce child poverty and enable them to measure their progress. This amendment would secure long-term focus on tackling child poverty which transcends changes of government.

I have listened to the former discussion and I am of the opinion that a lot of government and parliamentary time goes into chasing the horse once the horse has bolted. That is one of the big problems we have. We are talking about food and the fact that our children do not get fed properly; the poverty of knowledge, experience and need means that there are many millions of children in this country who have inherited poverty and, because they inherited poverty, they have a particular attitude towards food. I myself came from the Tizer-swilling, ice cream, Kit-Kat, Twix generation that took all those sorts of things, largely because that was what was on offer. I was culturally educated and socially created in that tradition.

I would like to see the Government have targets on reducing poverty, and I would like to have a debate on how we reduce it. I am not saying that I stand against the idea of giving children food—I welcome it. We welcomed it in the Big Issue and we celebrated the occasions when people like Marcus Rashford rushed forward and said, “Let’s have more food and free school meals for children”. I am a great believer in that. But the point is, when are we going to move beyond always responding once the horse has bolted? When are we going to move to a situation where we prevent children needing this?

One of the things that we could be doing is setting targets. We would be helping the Government, and ourselves, to look at all the things we can do to get rid of poverty, prevent poverty and cure people of poverty. I do not think that being well fed at school will necessarily make enormous changes to the trajectory of your life if you have been an inheritor of poverty. That is one of the major problems that we have. We have this situation where we are always coming up with bright and clever pilots, programmes and initiatives. Governments spend an enormous amount of time doing that.

I would love a situation where we try to say goodbye to poverty, and that will mean moving beyond these emergencies. I listen to the Government and the debates in society and I feel, in a way, that they are not much different from refugeeism. They are not much different from the internal refugees who exist in Britain: the people in the poorest situations who have inherited poverty. What we are doing is trying to make poverty a little bit more comfortable.

I am calling for the Government to have targets so that we can measure the effects of their efforts and advise and help them to move beyond this emergency-ism into prevention and cure-ism. Those are the kinds of areas I am interested in and why I tabled Amendment 163.

Will the Government commit to targets to reduce child poverty? Will the child poverty strategy include targets? I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to speak in support of Amendment 163, to which I have added my name. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for tabling it.

A recent article in the academic journal Social Policy & Administration on the harm done to children by the benefit cap and the two-child limit, demonstrated the implications of poverty for children’s well-being. The authors concluded that their evidence provides

“a stark illustration of the multiple and severe harms”,

including social and emotional harms,

“caused by poverty, and … the benefit cap and the two-child limit”.

Similarly, other academic research points to the “hidden injuries” and “degradations” suffered particularly by families in deep poverty. The Children’s Society’s The Good Childhood Report makes clear the damage poverty does to children’s well-being. New research from the Child Poverty Action Group, of which I am honorary president, highlights the ways in which lack of money can prevent secondary school children attending school and limits their time at school.

The establishment of the child poverty task force and the commitment to an ambitious child poverty strategy, which is the kind of thing the noble Lord is asking for, is thus very welcome. In a report I wrote recently for Compass, I supported the case made by End Child Poverty and many others for legally binding targets with clear milestones, pointing to the experience of the last Labour Government, when targets helped to galvanise action on child poverty, leading to a reduction of 600,000 or six percentage points. That experience underlined the importance of targets to the effectiveness of the emergent strategy.

CPAG conducted interviews with 40 practitioners with a range of expertise relating to child poverty. They were unanimous in their view that an effective strategy must set clear targets. CPAG argued that such targets for the short, medium and long term need to be “aspirational yet achievable”, learning from other countries.

The practitioners also make the case for a target relating to the depth of poverty, such as reducing average or median poverty depth. This, they suggest,

“will spur the strategy to increase incomes for all children in poverty and help to demonstrate progress even for children who remain in poverty”.

It might be “making poverty more comfortable”, to quote the noble Lord—like him, I would like to see the end of poverty—but in the short term, for those who are really pushed deep into poverty, making it slightly more comfortable is, perhaps, no bad thing. It would also help to counter the argument sometimes used against targets: that they encourage a “poverty plus a pound” mentality that thinks the job is done once enough people are pulled just across the poverty line. Incidentally, the same could be said of a parallel duty to measure children’s well-being, which is the subject of a later amendment.

In its latest poverty report, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation observed that the average person in poverty has an income 28% below the poverty line, up from 23% in the mid-1990s. Those living in very deep poverty have an average income 57% below the poverty line—an increase in the gap of nearly two-thirds over the past 25 years. Families have been pushed deeper and deeper into poverty, largely due to the huge cuts in social security made by the Conservative Governments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, if the noble Lord brings his amendment back, will he consider adding a target on deep poverty? A lot of what he has said so eloquently has been about people who have been pushed, by a range of policies, into deep poverty.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I have never heard of the concept of deep poverty. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said that poverty is different if you are in Weston-super-Mare or in Bristol. I was privileged to be banged up with people from the countryside, from the little cities and the big cities. I met all of them. We had a uniformity of thinking, which was so self-destructive. There is uniformity. There is a philosophy of poverty. Until we break through that, we are not going anywhere. The idea of relative poverty is ridiculous.

Unfortunately, we have increasing poverty because we have not attacked the inheritance of poverty. So many people break out of poverty because the parents choose not to simulate or duplicate what has happened before. My wife’s family come from poverty in India. They said goodbye to poverty. All the children have gone through college, done the levels and been to university. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.