Child Poverty

Debate between Lord Bird and Baroness Sherlock

Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this debate and all noble Lords who have spoken. Before I say anything more, I add my reflection to those of my noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, in memory of Lord Field. He was an example to all of us of what it means to take a whole lifetime and yet, at the end, never cease to be outraged by the level of child poverty in a rich country. We all owe him a debt.

Tonight’s debate has highlighted the multifaceted nature of poverty. Whenever we have debates on poverty, there is always a temptation for some people to say that it is not about money and other people to say that it is only about money. Manifestly neither is correct. It is not just about money but it is not not about money either. The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln and other noble Lords made a very clear point of explaining what happens when you simply do not have enough money. If that is the case, all the strategies and all the preventive work in the world does not help you feed your kids that night; you simply cannot afford to do it.

On the basic level of access to resources, Britain is not in a good place. Over a fifth of our population lives in relative poverty. I know that the Government prefer absolute poverty as a measure, probably because it normally falls as real incomes rise, but, in the latest statistics in the document Households Below Average Income, we learned that the share of people living in absolute poverty is going up again, as the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, pointed out. There are 600,000 more people, half of them children, living in absolute poverty, in what is still one of the richest countries in the world by global standards. We should not be in this space.

Look at how this cashes out. The IFS has been pointing out that the number in material deprivation rose by 3 million in the three years to last year. In that same time, the proportion of those who could not adequately heat their homes jumped from just 4% to 11%. I must say to the Minister that, although the Government chose to give people cost of living support, they gave the same amount of money to everybody, whether a single person living in a studio flat or somebody with a family living in a larger house. As a result, the official statistics said:

“Incomes for those with children reduced the most. This reflects the flat nature of the cost of living and additional support payments, meaning for larger households they are split between more household members”.


Have the Government reflected on the best way to support people in these circumstances?

I fully accept that it is about not just incomes but support and opportunity. But child poverty has combined with the impact of 14 years of public service neglect, frankly, and the differential impacts of the pandemic to produce an attainment gap between children who experienced deprivation and their peers, with a lifelong impact on their life chances.

What should happen now? The last Labour Government lifted 2 million children and pensioners out of poverty. I know the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said at the start that he thinks, essentially, “A plague on all your houses. None of you has done anything”, but I am proud that the last Labour Government introduced Sure Start. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out, not only did it have an effect at the time but children had better GCSEs later as a result of having been part of Sure Start back then. I had a privilege of being part of the Treasury team working with Gordon Brown on questions of poverty when Sure Start was being introduced.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I just want to say that I used Sure Start. In spite of appearances, I was a very young father, and it was the most wonderful thing. I lived on the largest housing estate in south London and Sure Start was absolutely brilliant, so I am 100% behind it.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for clarifying that. One of the most depressing points of my career, frankly, was coming into the Lords in 2010 and having to sit on the Opposition Benches watching everything that I had worked on introducing being dismantled stage by stage in the name of austerity. However, we are where we are.

What should happen now? If the British people were to trust Labour again in an election—and obviously I hope they will—then we would want to introduce a mission-driven Government, and one of our five key missions would be to break down the barriers to opportunity for every child at every stage, with a strategy to tackle child poverty. It would be the responsibility of all government departments to tackle the fundamental drivers of poverty. We would address that by having cross-departmental mission boards looking at exactly how that was being driven across departments.

We would focus on increasing the number of young people in education, employment or training. We would look to reform childcare and early years support, introduce free breakfast clubs, and improve school standards. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, about the importance of the nutritional content of school food and of access to sports.

On financial education, I am split. I agree with the noble Earl about the importance of financial education. However, recently I have met people who work for charities that traditionally have given debt advice. They told me in the past they would bring people in, sit them down, look at all the sources of income and all their outgoings, and help them to manage their budgets. They are now saying that more and more—sometimes most—of the people they come across literally do not have enough money to do it. Their budgets cannot be balanced; even the charity workers cannot balance them, with all their skills in financial education and management. So we have something of a crisis here. We need people who can manage to be taught how to manage well, while those who simply cannot manage it, however good they are, need to be helped to find a way through that. We would therefore want to support our social security system, strengthen rights to representation at work, improve social security and extend sick pay. We would boost wages by removing the minimum wage bands and expanding the remit of the Low Pay Commission.

We would want to tackle the housing crisis by retrofitting homes, strengthening renters’ rights and building more social and affordable housing. I take the underlying point that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, is making: decent, affordable and safe housing is a necessary but not sufficient condition to enable people to move out of poverty. It is both of those things. It is necessary because many of the people who would not be in social housing would otherwise be in bed and breakfasts, insecurely housed or, even worse, out on the streets.

We need nothing short of national renewal in this country. It will not happen overnight and will not be easy, but it should surely be the priority of any Government to guarantee opportunity to all our children. That is something I think we can all get behind.