Child Poverty

Lord Kinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kinnock]

After the last two answers, is not the Minister going to conclude that he has been taking refuge in statistics and semantics rather than addressing the fundamental question raised by my noble friend, which relates to the level of child poverty in this relatively affluent country? Is it not clear that, even if the institute’s calculations were significantly wrong, we would still be talking about a rise of more than 500,000 in the number of children in poor families in the foreseeable future in the 21st century? Can the Minister give us his own objective view of whether that is morally, socially and economically acceptable, or whether it is appalling?

[Lord Freud]

What is vital with child poverty is that we decide on how to tackle it. Under the last Government, we found that enormous amounts of money were spent on tackling it without hardly moving a figure. In the last few years of that Government, it hardly shifted. The noble Lord can look at the figures himself. We spend 3.6% of GDP on children and families; we are the second highest in the UNICEF measures, and we get precious little bang for our buck. We end up well down the table in performance for how children do. We need to work out how to solve child poverty and not worry about income transfers, which do not achieve the outcome.