Poverty Programmes: Audit

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will conduct audits of the poverty programmes they support, and publish the results; and if not, why not.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

We have a range of programmes across government to transform lives, from the troubled families programme and the pupil premium to our flagship reform, universal credit, and we audit the majority of these. Work is the best route out of poverty and this Government are committed to transforming lives by providing people with the support they need at all stages to get into work.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it not a verity of poverty that one of the big problems with poverty itself is that a lot of the support goes to enabling people to live in poverty and very little is spent on dismantling poverty? So I ask the Minister whether it is possible to create a new way of measuring poverty statistics that asks the question: does this get people out of poverty? There is too much emphasis on keeping people in poverty.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, that question goes along exactly the lines that we are going along in trying to transform the welfare system. We aim to create programmes that promote independence among people and the centrepiece of that is universal credit. Within universal credit we have developed what we call a test and learn approach, which monitors the behavioural responses very closely.