Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Baroness Stroud and Baroness Grey-Thompson

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 25 in the name of my noble friend Lord Listowel, to which my name is also added. It is vital to measure and report on the number of children living in poverty. The reason I support the amendment is that child poverty is multifaceted. The principle of the existing Child Poverty Act, which had cross-party support at its implementation in 2010, was that no child in the UK should live in poverty but that all should have financial security, a good home and the educational opportunity that they need to give them the best chance in life.

While the Government have said that they will continue to produce, although not report on, the households below average income report from which the headline child poverty rates are derived, without the statutory reporting requirement there would be nothing to prevent a future Government from ceasing to produce HBAI statistics. I do not believe that this should be allowed to happen without a change in primary legislation and proper scrutiny from both Houses of Parliament.

There is no perfect measure to understand child poverty, but it is clear to me that income needs to be at the core. There might be other factors such as parental addiction, neglect and depression, and they may increase the risk of income poverty—and they have effects on their own—but the most fundamental problem is that children growing up in households with low relative incomes will find it harder to thrive.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has already mentioned the report from Kitty Stewart and Nick Roberts for the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. The Royal Statistical Society has described the existing relative measure as,

“the product of valid social science procedure”,

arguing that,

“any replacement would need to be subject to the same degree of rigour, including a robust process of consultation”.

Why is the Minister ignoring his own Government’s consultation, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has raised? Out of the 203 responses that referred to income, only nine felt that income should not be a headline measure, and just one, from a private individual, felt that income should not be included at all. I urge the Minister to look at this amendment again.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, until now, we have focused on measuring income by the HBAI statistics. But if we also measure life chances, we will also invest in supporting people by reversing the dynamics that cause people to be poor. There are a number of flaws in the way in which the current child poverty measures are collected. They show poverty falling when the economy is in recession. If you raise the national living wage, you can statistically increase child poverty. If you invest in pensioners, this, too, can plunge children into poverty statistically. We do not want a measure that is so easy to move in the wrong direction when Governments do the right thing and that moves in the right direction when the economy is in recession. We want measures that actually identify those whom we are concerned about, and that incentivise government support and intervention to do the right thing to improve the life chances of those who are in poverty.

The life chances measures are designed to ask what drives poverty. They ask the question, “Who are these families and how can they best be supported?”. It is not the same families who are in poverty year on year. Half of all children who are poor in one year are not poor one year later. The fact that half these families get themselves up and out and can improve their own life chances leads us to ask the question, “Which families get stuck, and why?”. The vast majority of children in poverty belong either to families who are workless or who are working only part-time. Some 74% of poor workless households who have found work escape poverty. This is why the Government have put employment at the heart of their life chances measures. There is no single more effective anti-poverty strategy than moving a family from unemployment to full-time work.