Child Poverty Unit

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am terribly sorry to say this, but I think I did answer the Question directly. What was the purpose of the child poverty unit? Its purpose was to measure the income-related targets set up by the previous Government. Those targets were a waste of time and we got rid of them. We have now set up something better—the Social Mobility Commission secretariat, based in the Department for Education. As I said in my original Answer, the appropriate measure for these things should be parental worklessness—a responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions—and children’s educational attainment, and those are the two that we will look at.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Have the Government measured in any way the impact on people who fail at school and their relationship to child poverty? Are there any facts and figures so that we can chart whether the policies that the Minister is talking about actually work?