Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I support two amendments in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, Amendment 99, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, Amendment 100, both of which I have put my name to.

With more than 80,000 children in care, the highest figure on record, this Bill represents an opportunity to strengthen support for all care leavers. One in three care leavers becomes homeless in the first two years after leaving care. Many become drug users and end up with a criminal record.

Some of the most affected care-experienced children are those from diverse backgrounds, who suffer double discrimination. Research by Barnardo’s found that nearly one in 10 black children in care has received a custodial sentence by the time they turn 18. When many finally leave care, they find themselves in prison or with a criminal record, which makes it difficult to find a home or employment, or develop a secure, happy life and any hope of a prosperous existence. They find themselves being part of a gang, which becomes a family substitute but leads to even more disaster.

As the Minister said in reference to the earlier group of amendments, there is an urgent need to improve understanding across agencies and departments of the needs of children in care and care-experienced young people, as well as providing training on how to better address these needs. For example, the Department for Education could extend corporate parenting principles to all bodies involved with care-experienced young people.

As we have heard, many young people can depend on their parents to support them long after they leave school or university, both financially and with a roof over their head. But support for care leavers across the country is piecemeal—a postcode lottery. Ashley John-Baptiste’s book, Looked After: A Childhood in Care, which I highly recommend, illustrates graphically just how difficult it is for young people to navigate their life after leaving care without support, especially if they want to go to university. It is potluck and almost an impossible task. Therefore, we should be doing more to ensure that care leavers are supported into adulthood, which I why I support Amendment 99 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

Through Amendment 100, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, seeks to increase protection for care leavers facing homelessness. I welcome this amendment and fully support it. We need to support care leavers and give them the opportunity to forge a happy, secure and hopeful life. It is our duty to do this and I hope that the Minister will agree with me and other Peers, and support these amendments.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, on Amendment 100, from the noble Lord, Lord Young, I will offer a bit of Big Issue news. We did a survey in the early part of this century in which we surveyed 150 to 200 Big Issue vendors. Some 80% of them had been through the care system; most of them had been in care for a period of at least 10 years. I wrote an article about this which upset a lot of people, because I said that, in order to produce a Big Issue vendor, you had to spend over £1 million. To me, that is one of most frightening things: how expensive it is to keep people poor.

It costs £70,000 to keep somebody in foster care, but it costs almost £200,000 to keep somebody in care. We need to look at this problem. In spite of all the moral outrage, we need to look at this as a bit of fiscal bad news. We have to start shifting our resources towards moving children into foster care as much as possible. I am going to talk about this later, but I wanted to give noble Lords the news that Big Issue vendors are very, very expensive.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?

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That is exactly what this amendment proposes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I second the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young. I am very interested in foster caring, largely because when I was in care as a young child, it was largely because I did not really have a family. I had a mother and a father, and I had brothers who were taken away in one direction. My parents were not very grown up; they had not really got used to the idea of having six children when they could probably afford only one.

I find this amendment so interesting because it backs up my experience as a young boy. When our family finally reconnected in Fulham in south-west London, the place was littered with foster-children. It was very interesting. I got to know people who went to my school, and they were fostered. They were not blood brothers or sisters or related to their family. I found that so interesting because most of those children, dare I say—I do not want to appear as a classist—ended up being quite middle class. They ended up getting the education of a lot of us who passed through care. It was interesting that, in this area of Fulham, there was this great mixture of very working-class children with a bit of a middle-class aspect, yet the children who really excelled were the ones who had the all-round relationships.

I would love to see a strategy that got behind those circa 130,000 people who want to foster. I would like to see a shrinking of the numbers of local authority homes, having been in a Catholic one, which was not an awful lot different from any other kind. The idea of institutionally raising children is not good news. The idea of raising children who were separated from their loved ones—as I was—is bad news. Therefore, I suggest we follow the example from the noble Lord, Lord Young, and create a proper strategy so that we can share out the loving relationships that we need to to our children, who are in desperate need, especially at the time when their own kith and kin cannot provide them with what they really need.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 134, 143 and 178. Fostering is critical to the provision of good care for all children who need it, and it is a really tough job.

In Committee so far, not very much has been said about the very large proportion of looked-after children who have significant special needs—it is more than 90% of all children in children’s homes, and it is over 70% of all looked-after children. Many of those are problems that have arisen as a result of post-birth experience, but there are quite a lot of instances where these are problems that children were born with and will be with them for life. Some children are in foster care precisely because their birth parents have not been able to cope with their significant needs, so we ask a tremendous amount of foster carers.

The measures in the amendment to improve on the current position are very welcome. But the Government could go further in some very practical ways, which is why I support my noble friend’s amendments. Room sharing is not always appropriate, but for some children it will be suitable. Similarly, foster carers need more authority to make more of the decisions and do more of the often everyday things that parents do.

I support the comments made about the need for streamlined recruitment processes and a foster care strategy that really thinks about the support services, training, respite and wider services that help foster carers to do it well, to feel that they have the capacity and that they can sustain the tremendous effort of foster caring through the whole period that any given child needs it. There is an opportunity here.

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Specifically on Amendment 143 regarding a foster care strategy, just as we quite often turn to legislation to demonstrate action, we understand the need sometimes to turn to a strategy to demonstrate the significance that the Government place on an issue and to ensure that a wide-ranging set of actions is being taken. I hope that, in outlining the action that is already being taken, I can provide some reassurance about the emphasis that the Government are already placing on—

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I just wanted to remind us of a little bit of history. Napoleon said that a battle plan strategy was the most useless thing on earth but that you were lost without it.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

That is good, because I was about to say—although I think he called it a battle plan, not a battle strategy—that the Government will set out our plans for foster care in due course, bringing together the range of activities that is already happening and taking on board the need to go further in the way that noble Lords have rightly pushed us to today.

Amendment 105, introduced by my noble friend Lord Watson, is on the introduction of a national foster care register. As he outlined, fostering services currently maintain local registers of foster carers alongside records relating to prospective foster carers. A national foster care register would insert central government into the systems and processes of foster care oversight, which are currently deployed locally. But as he said, and as I think my honourable friend in the other place outlined in Committee there, we are considering the possible benefits and costs of a national register of foster carers as part of our wider reforms.

There are a range of proposals for such a register. It will require some careful consideration. Specifically, I am sure we all recognise the need to ensure that a national foster care register would also meet local needs and avoid unforeseen negative consequences, and that it would overcome some of the risks surrounding the security of sensitive data, as well as imposing additional bureaucracy on the sector. But we want to engage with fostering stakeholders on this issue to determine next steps, and we can see some of the advantages of the national register that my noble friend outlined.

Amendment 134, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is on the sharing of bedrooms for foster children to enable foster carers to look after more children in their home. She identified that one of the pushes for this comes back to one of the fundamental issues that we will discuss on upcoming clauses and which lies very much at the heart of the Government’s reforms: the insufficiency of high-quality places, fostering or otherwise, for the children who need them. I completely understand the belief that changing standards in this way might enable us to increase capacity.

I have already identified that the Government will invest money, for example, in allowing extensions and other ways that foster carers might alter their homes to provide more space and capacity for children. But it is also the case that our national minimum standards already allow foster children aged three or over to share a bedroom, subject to conditions being met, which are in place to safeguard and protect children. That means that fostered children, such as siblings, can share a bedroom where it is in the best interests of the child, provided that each child has their own area of the room.

We can update those national minimum standards at any time. We do not require a change to Section 23 of the Care Standards Act, as suggested in this amendment, to do so. The language in this amendment would change the tone of the national minimum standards. I am not averse to the point that is being made here; we just need to be careful about the balance that we are setting. It would shift the default position to present room sharing both as appropriate and, in fact, standard practice, rather than the current tone, where room sharing should be considered where it is not possible for each child to have their own room.

I think we all agree that children in foster care deserve to be treated as a good parent would treat their own children and to have the opportunity for as full an experience of family life and childhood as possible. I know that there are many good parents who will have children who share bedrooms, especially at a younger age, but I also know that for many children, fostered or otherwise, and for many parents, the gold standard would for them to have their own room. If we add to that the fact that children often enter foster care after experiencing neglect or abuse, including sexual abuse, and may have a greater need for their own personal space and for privacy, we can see the need to be careful about shifting the position to promoting sharing.

We recognise that room sharing in foster care may be suitable, as I have said, particularly for siblings, and we think it is right that flexibilities are already in place, but we are reluctant to suggest that room sharing should be promoted as standard practice. Importantly, we have seen no evidence from children and young people themselves to suggest that they want room sharing to become standard practice in foster care.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

163: After Clause 26, insert the following new Clause—
“Child poverty targets(1) The Secretary of State must, as soon as reasonably practicable after the publication of the Child Poverty Strategy and no later than 31 March 2026 if that strategy has not been published, lay regulations made by statutory instrument that establish binding child poverty targets.(2) Child poverty targets must include—(a) targets for reducing the number of children living in poverty, and(b) timescales by which each target must be achieved.(3) The Secretary of State must lay an annual report before Parliament setting out—(a) steps they have taken to deliver on the child poverty targets, and(b) progress that has been made towards the child poverty targets.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets in regulations.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Amendment 163 in my name would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets and report on them annually to Parliament. This amendment will hold the Government to their promise to reduce child poverty and enable them to measure their progress. This amendment would secure long-term focus on tackling child poverty which transcends changes of government.

I have listened to the former discussion and I am of the opinion that a lot of government and parliamentary time goes into chasing the horse once the horse has bolted. That is one of the big problems we have. We are talking about food and the fact that our children do not get fed properly; the poverty of knowledge, experience and need means that there are many millions of children in this country who have inherited poverty and, because they inherited poverty, they have a particular attitude towards food. I myself came from the Tizer-swilling, ice cream, Kit-Kat, Twix generation that took all those sorts of things, largely because that was what was on offer. I was culturally educated and socially created in that tradition.

I would like to see the Government have targets on reducing poverty, and I would like to have a debate on how we reduce it. I am not saying that I stand against the idea of giving children food—I welcome it. We welcomed it in the Big Issue and we celebrated the occasions when people like Marcus Rashford rushed forward and said, “Let’s have more food and free school meals for children”. I am a great believer in that. But the point is, when are we going to move beyond always responding once the horse has bolted? When are we going to move to a situation where we prevent children needing this?

One of the things that we could be doing is setting targets. We would be helping the Government, and ourselves, to look at all the things we can do to get rid of poverty, prevent poverty and cure people of poverty. I do not think that being well fed at school will necessarily make enormous changes to the trajectory of your life if you have been an inheritor of poverty. That is one of the major problems that we have. We have this situation where we are always coming up with bright and clever pilots, programmes and initiatives. Governments spend an enormous amount of time doing that.

I would love a situation where we try to say goodbye to poverty, and that will mean moving beyond these emergencies. I listen to the Government and the debates in society and I feel, in a way, that they are not much different from refugeeism. They are not much different from the internal refugees who exist in Britain: the people in the poorest situations who have inherited poverty. What we are doing is trying to make poverty a little bit more comfortable.

I am calling for the Government to have targets so that we can measure the effects of their efforts and advise and help them to move beyond this emergency-ism into prevention and cure-ism. Those are the kinds of areas I am interested in and why I tabled Amendment 163.

Will the Government commit to targets to reduce child poverty? Will the child poverty strategy include targets? I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to speak in support of Amendment 163, to which I have added my name. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for tabling it.

A recent article in the academic journal Social Policy & Administration on the harm done to children by the benefit cap and the two-child limit, demonstrated the implications of poverty for children’s well-being. The authors concluded that their evidence provides

“a stark illustration of the multiple and severe harms”,

including social and emotional harms,

“caused by poverty, and … the benefit cap and the two-child limit”.

Similarly, other academic research points to the “hidden injuries” and “degradations” suffered particularly by families in deep poverty. The Children’s Society’s The Good Childhood Report makes clear the damage poverty does to children’s well-being. New research from the Child Poverty Action Group, of which I am honorary president, highlights the ways in which lack of money can prevent secondary school children attending school and limits their time at school.

The establishment of the child poverty task force and the commitment to an ambitious child poverty strategy, which is the kind of thing the noble Lord is asking for, is thus very welcome. In a report I wrote recently for Compass, I supported the case made by End Child Poverty and many others for legally binding targets with clear milestones, pointing to the experience of the last Labour Government, when targets helped to galvanise action on child poverty, leading to a reduction of 600,000 or six percentage points. That experience underlined the importance of targets to the effectiveness of the emergent strategy.

CPAG conducted interviews with 40 practitioners with a range of expertise relating to child poverty. They were unanimous in their view that an effective strategy must set clear targets. CPAG argued that such targets for the short, medium and long term need to be “aspirational yet achievable”, learning from other countries.

The practitioners also make the case for a target relating to the depth of poverty, such as reducing average or median poverty depth. This, they suggest,

“will spur the strategy to increase incomes for all children in poverty and help to demonstrate progress even for children who remain in poverty”.

It might be “making poverty more comfortable”, to quote the noble Lord—like him, I would like to see the end of poverty—but in the short term, for those who are really pushed deep into poverty, making it slightly more comfortable is, perhaps, no bad thing. It would also help to counter the argument sometimes used against targets: that they encourage a “poverty plus a pound” mentality that thinks the job is done once enough people are pulled just across the poverty line. Incidentally, the same could be said of a parallel duty to measure children’s well-being, which is the subject of a later amendment.

In its latest poverty report, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation observed that the average person in poverty has an income 28% below the poverty line, up from 23% in the mid-1990s. Those living in very deep poverty have an average income 57% below the poverty line—an increase in the gap of nearly two-thirds over the past 25 years. Families have been pushed deeper and deeper into poverty, largely due to the huge cuts in social security made by the Conservative Governments.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for recognising the enormously broad way in which the Child Poverty Taskforce has undertaken its work, under the leadership of my right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. It has been about looking at the whole breadth of actions that this Government can take, and engaging with those who have the most experience of what it means to be poor, as well as others who represent them. I hope and believe that broad approach and the commitment of this Labour Government will make the real impact to children that we all seek.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her assessment, but I do not agree. It is interesting that, when she outlined how she will tackle poverty, she mentioned school uniforms, breakfast clubs and social housing. I have an opinion, which I expressed earlier; I think that food clubs are a response to the fact that the horse has bolted and we are chasing it down the hill. The same goes for uniforms: they are not necessarily methodologies to dismantle poverty.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord accept that I was not making that argument? What I was actually arguing—in agreement with him—is that we need a multifaceted approach and that we need to look at the causes for people ending up in poverty. Taking action to reduce the costs for families around the country—the costs he has just referenced—is an important thing that the Government can do, alongside the more strategic, detailed and cross-cutting work that the child poverty task force is also doing.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I agree with the Minister 100%. We should never, ever abandon people who are in an emergency. But, if that is what we are doing, and if that is what most of our efforts go into, we will never come to the day when we dismantle poverty.

My problem—I have talked about this on a number of occasions in the House—is around social housing. I had an argument with a leading Member of this House, who was in social housing for many decades. I made the point to him, “Isn’t it interesting and damning that, if you give somebody social housing in current times, there’s a distinct possibility that their children and their children’s children—and, probably, their children’s grandchildren—will live in poverty?” Because social housing produces only in the region of 2%, 3% or 4% of the social mobility of finishing your levels and getting into university or an apprenticeship. Social housing is not a route out of poverty; it is, in a way, a stumbling block.

We will not move forward until we revolutionise social housing and go back to the kind of social housing that I had when we moved from the slums of Notting Hill and into a Catholic orphanage. We then left that and went into social housing in Fulham, where we had sociable housing: the people there included police officers and a trainee teacher. I have talked about this on countless occasions. We had our first parking warden; we did know what to do with him, because most of us did not have a car. The point is that there was a social element, including the disabled and the old. The problem is that, because social housing has lost its sociability and has become a place of refuge and deep need—which we cannot turn against—we have people who remain for ever in an emergency.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, because they argued for targets far more eloquently than me—this is my first amendment, so I am getting used to it and learning on the job. The point is that targets will get us thinking about those kinds of levels. What do we have to do next to get people out of poverty? We have to go beyond the food, the uniforms and the social housing. We have to get to the enemies of the people who pass through poverty, because they are “mind-forg’d manacles”.

I am not decrying this, but I had an argument a few years ago when they were saying, “Why don’t we list all the ingredients that go into a Mars bar, a KitKat, a Twix or a bottle of Coca-Cola?”, so that people would read them and say, “I’m not going to eat that”. The “mind-forg’d manacles” of poverty mean that you will go for the Coca-Cola whether or not it is good for you. These are the things that we need to do to dismantle poverty. One of the simplest ways is to concentrate the Government by bringing in all the philosophical, intellectual, cultural and social reasons why people are caught in poverty.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, if the noble Lord brings his amendment back, will he consider adding a target on deep poverty? A lot of what he has said so eloquently has been about people who have been pushed, by a range of policies, into deep poverty.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I have never heard of the concept of deep poverty. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said that poverty is different if you are in Weston-super-Mare or in Bristol. I was privileged to be banged up with people from the countryside, from the little cities and the big cities. I met all of them. We had a uniformity of thinking, which was so self-destructive. There is uniformity. There is a philosophy of poverty. Until we break through that, we are not going anywhere. The idea of relative poverty is ridiculous.

Unfortunately, we have increasing poverty because we have not attacked the inheritance of poverty. So many people break out of poverty because the parents choose not to simulate or duplicate what has happened before. My wife’s family come from poverty in India. They said goodbye to poverty. All the children have gone through college, done the levels and been to university. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 163 withdrawn.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

107: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause—
“Child poverty targets(1) The Secretary of State must, as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than 30 September 2026, and then at the start of each Parliament, lay regulations made by statutory instrument that establish binding child poverty targets.(2) Child poverty targets must include—(a) targets for reducing the number of children living in poverty,(b) targets for reducing the number of children living in deep poverty, and(c) timescales by which each target must be achieved.(3) The Secretary of State must lay an annual report before Parliament setting out—(a) steps they have taken to deliver on the child poverty targets, and(b) progress that has been made towards the child poverty targets.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets in regulations at the start of each Parliament.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am very pleased that this amendment is to be discussed again. What troubles me is that it could be such a small, insignificant thing to ask for targets from the Government. Are targets part of the armoury that we use to get rid of poverty? If we are endeavouring to get rid of poverty, we will need more than targets. We will need houses; we will need training for parents so that they do not pass poverty down to the next generation; we will need a Government who will converge and co-ordinate all the efforts into some form whereby they can say that they are disentangling the situation.

At the moment, we have eight government departments dealing with poverty. I imagine that if we did not have a Ministry of Defence and people decided to attack this country, we would form a Ministry of Defence, bring everything together and not leave it to eight different ministries. The same goes for poverty. Poverty is destroying us. Poverty is stopping schools delivering schooling: 30% of teachers’ time is spent on the problems that are caused when poverty enters the classroom. In our health service, 50% of people who suffer from cardiological—whatever you call it; forgive me, I have new teeth—are suffering from food poverty.

I have used this amendment to raise not only the question of targets but the point that the Government should use them. They should have others measuring their homework rather than doing it themselves. I have heard from the Government that, if you have targets, you tend to have people massaging the figures to make it look as though the targets are being achieved and that you then go after the low-hanging fruit because you do not get anywhere near the hardest to reach—you can achieve your targets by concentrating on the fact that it is easier to help those who are the low-hanging fruit.

Overall, my big question is whether targets could fit in a panoply of organised, convergent energy that is used to get rid of poverty. I am not here to talk just about just this amendment but about the fact that every Government I know have had all sorts of initiatives to get rid of poverty, but we never see the end of it. Some 4.5 million children are caught in poverty and that is a tremendous indictment not of this Government nor of the last one, and not even of the Government before that, but of the methodology. It is an inherited methodology that is passed down every generation of Government and takes the same form.

Let us please look at targets and be honest about them, and begin, as a society and as a Chamber, to look at the idea that we follow my example and put a lot of work into having a ministry of poverty prevention and cure. The problem is that 90% of all the money that is spent on poverty is spent on the emergency of poverty. We cannot put all our energy into the emergency; we must try to have prevention and cure.

I shall end there because I have not got an awful lot to say about targets. I have said everything; it is all in Hansard. I would love all noble Lords to consider that the Government should at least allow us our targets, and then we can look at all the other things that we need over the coming months and years where we converge and concatenate the energies necessary to get rid of poverty. I inherited poverty and that makes me a fierce warrior to end the inheritance of poverty. I started from behind. Most of those who live in poverty never get to the starting line. We cannot all be Boris Johnson. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 107, to which I have added my name, moved by such a warrior against poverty, not least as it provides an opportunity to welcome the Government’s landmark child poverty strategy. Sadly, the Opposition did not think it important enough to ask for the Statement on it to be repeated in your Lordships’ House. I welcome, too, the strategy’s accompanying monitoring and evaluation frameworks, supported by a theory of change, based on clear measures and what it calls a “wide-ranging evidence base”. This includes hearing directly from children, young people and families with lived experience of poverty, building on the strong engagement with them during the strategy’s development.

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[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 107, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to set legally binding child poverty reduction targets. I agree with other noble Lords that we have a shared objective to tackle child poverty. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his commitment, the campaigning that he does and for the engagement with the Government on child poverty. We had a very good meeting, I thought, where we talked about the work of the Big Issue and the rightful challenge to the Government to ensure that the structure within government and the measurement of our objectives meet the challenge that has been set here. I will talk about how we will ensure that this happens.

I am proud that this Government have now published our child poverty strategy, going far beyond rhetoric—as one noble Lord suggested that we should do. But I do not agree with those who have argued that all Governments are the same or that the strategy lacks credibility. Several noble Lords have quoted the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Its annual poverty report, published yesterday, states that the child poverty strategy is “hugely welcome”—particularly after the last Government made no progress in reducing poverty. The foundation welcomes the child poverty strategy delivering the projected biggest reduction in child poverty in a single Parliament.

We have been clear that our wide-ranging child poverty strategy will see the largest reduction in child poverty by any Government in a single Parliament, lifting 550,000 children out of poverty, principally through the expansion of free school meals and removing the two-child limit. These are both things that this Government have already done—to take up the challenge set by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. But, of course, we need to measure and demonstrate progress being made on this strategy.

I completely take on board that challenge. That is why the monitoring and evaluation framework, which was published alongside the strategy, set out that a baseline report will be published in summer 2026, with annual reporting on progress thereafter. It will be quite clear what progress the Government are making in a range of areas, and it will be possible to hold this Government to account for delivering on this crucial strategy and on our objectives. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that it will be very clear to voters that this Government will make progress, as the previous Labour Government did, in tackling the scourge of child poverty.

We recognise that our approach to monitoring and evaluation will need to evolve and adapt, as the strategy must, reflecting the dynamic nature of poverty and the broader social and economic factors that influence it. Although I understand the powerful point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, about the government machinery for ensuring progress, I think a strength of the child poverty strategy is that it is explicitly cross-government. It recognises that it will need action in a range of different areas to tackle child poverty. I also take his point that there needs to be a central directing part of government. That is why we have committed to maintain a child poverty team with cross-government oversight by Ministers.

These clear reporting arrangements and the focus on child poverty within government show our commitment and leadership and will ensure that the progress that we make is transparent to all. We will continue to work closely with the whole sector committed to tackling child poverty, as we have done in developing the strategy. We believe that this is the best approach, rather than introducing statutory targets. For these reasons, I hope I have provided some assurance about the commitment of this Government, the broad action that we will take as a result of the strategy, and the measurement and evaluation that we will put in place in order to ensure that the public and this House can hold us to account for progress. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Thank you very much. I have decided to join the Conservative Party. Can I meet the noble Earl afterwards and fill in the forms? Forgive me, I was only joking. I have never received such praise in the House.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I was trying to say that we need a new toolkit to dismantle poverty. Having a way of measuring it and of taking people to task because we say, “This is what you said you would achieve” can never be, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, the be-all and end-all. It must be part of the road towards the accumulation of evidence, the accumulation of opportunity and the accumulation of thinking that gets us somewhere we have never been before.

I do not want to pooh-pooh the Government or any Government for achieving the remarkable removal of 450,000 young people from poverty, but what about the other 4 million? That is the real problem. The real problem is that we are passing from generation to generation. A load of people who I have identified— 90% of the people I work with in homelessness, 90% of the people I work with in long-term unemployment, and 90% of the people I work with in the custodial system—come from the inheritance of poverty. They inherit poverty in the same way that Boris Johnson or David Cameron or anybody else inherits their position in the pecking order. If we have a situation where we have millions of people never arriving at the starting line of life, we have a major problem. That is where we need to concentrate our energy.