Poverty

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

That is one of the topics that I and the Schools Minister are talking about. We now have, as a potential option for future use, far more specific measures of real levels of poverty in universal credit which we can use to record poverty, rather than the much cruder measures that we used in the legacy system.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, if the Minister wants to measure poverty he could perhaps look at the official figures that came out this week. They show that while average household incomes are finally back to their pre-crash levels, child poverty has actually gone up by 200,000. It is the first rise for a decade, the largest single rise in one year since 1996, and even more of those poor kids are in working families. Ministers were warned by people around this House that this would be a consequence of government policy but the Minister kept telling us that we were crying wolf. I have rarely been sorrier to be wrong. But now that the warning signs are clear, what will the Government do about it? We have not yet had the effect of the cut in universal credit help or benefits for large families. Will he please urge his new Secretary of State, if he genuinely wants a one-nation country, to go back and reverse that catastrophic decision to cut help for working families on universal credit?

[Lord Freud]

Regrettably, the cry of wolf is wrong in this case. As the noble Baroness knows perfectly well, these statistics are fairly odd on a year-by-year basis. We have had quite a substantial rise in the median income, so the relative figure has gone down—although, I am told, it is genuinely not statistically significant. At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of children living in absolute poverty, with 100,000 fewer. These figures can be pretty odd, and this is another good example of it.