Child Poverty Strategy
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(3 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for her kind words. I am very grateful and I agree with her very much indeed on that—I am very glad to be here as well.
She makes a really important point. One of the reasons we have taken our time and been thoughtful about the child poverty strategy is that it cannot ever be just about income transfers. The strategy will be looking across four key themes. Increasing incomes is one of them, but so is reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience for families and looking at better local support, especially in the early years. We must take action across all those if we are to find a way to tackle the scourge of child poverty in this country in a way that builds in structural improvements for the future. She makes an important point.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, my question is also not about the two-child limit, though I am fully supportive of its removal. Can the Minister say something about listening to the voices of children and young people within the formation of the strategy and give some examples of how the voices of children and young people have maybe changed the mind of the Government in their approach?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate. The task force has engaged astonishingly widely. The Children’s Commissioner was commissioned to do listening events directly with children, to hear their voices. A lot of work has gone on listening to organisations, families and parents, but listening to children describing their own experiences sometimes brings out things that the Government and even those organisations would not have thought of.
In terms of the wider groups, I have been able to do a little bit of this, even though it is not quite in my portfolio. However, the right reverend Prelate’s right reverend friend the Bishop of Derby very kindly invited me up to Derby to meet families at a family hub and to look at what the local authority and the faith groups were doing. Every time this happens, I am blown away by the resilience of individual families and the power of local communities, faith groups and local authorities to work together to make the lives of their communities better. The more we can engage with that and the more we can hear their voices, the better we are going to do this.
Universal Credit: Two-child Limit
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, since the noble Viscount’s Government brought in the policy, he probably does not need me to remind him there are exceptions—for example, those involved in kinship care and those who have produced a child as a result of non-consensual conception, who can be exempted if they can produce evidence of having been raped and the conception being the result of that, or if they can find another way to account for that. However, this is not the driver behind the Government’s action. This Government want to make the lives of children and families better. I make no apologies for starting off by looking at the terrible rise in child poverty over the last 14 years, and I cheered the Prime Minister when one of his early actions was to set up a cross-government child poverty task force and a unit to look at the full range of drivers of that. If our children grow up in poverty, it has a scarring effect that they do not recover from. If we do nothing else in our time in government, we need to find a way to address this, and I hope this could eventually be the cross-party view.
During the last Labour Government, I worked in the Treasury advising Gordon Brown and had to tackle child poverty. We set up Sure Start and invested in all kinds of programmes, and I sat in this House and watched many of them being dismantled when I went into opposition. If we are going to find a way to make the country better for all our children, we surely need to agree on how we tackle child poverty and stop it recurring generation after generation.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, reference has already been made to the Children’s Commissioner’s report published yesterday, which gives voice to the experiences of children and young people in poverty. It makes for harrowing reading, including one boy who was faced with the choice of going hungry or eating mouldy food, and many other such difficult stories. Will the Minister commit to ensuring that all the Government’s work on welfare will be based on the human dignity and equal value of every person in this country?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I thank the right reverend Prelate for that, and, indeed, for the work that he and his colleagues do in this area. Like him, one of the reasons I was so glad to see the report, even though it is hard reading for the Government and for everyone, is that it talks about individual stories and the experience of individuals. There is always a risk when we are trying to make decisions at a macro level that we forget how they are experienced at the micro level of the individual. One of the things the task force has done is to have lots of encounters with families and children. It has worked with Save the Children to hear from children, and it has worked with the Children’s Commissioner. I was very grateful that, as part of the process, his colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby welcomed me to Derby to meet a range of faith organisations working on many different aspects and trying to join up the support given to families with children. His point about, in essence, the inalienable worth of every individual is one I am very happy to approve.