Child Poverty Strategy

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her kind words. I am very grateful and I agree with her very much indeed on that—I am very glad to be here as well.

She makes a really important point. One of the reasons we have taken our time and been thoughtful about the child poverty strategy is that it cannot ever be just about income transfers. The strategy will be looking across four key themes. Increasing incomes is one of them, but so is reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience for families and looking at better local support, especially in the early years. We must take action across all those if we are to find a way to tackle the scourge of child poverty in this country in a way that builds in structural improvements for the future. She makes an important point.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, my question is also not about the two-child limit, though I am fully supportive of its removal. Can the Minister say something about listening to the voices of children and young people within the formation of the strategy and give some examples of how the voices of children and young people have maybe changed the mind of the Government in their approach?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate. The task force has engaged astonishingly widely. The Children’s Commissioner was commissioned to do listening events directly with children, to hear their voices. A lot of work has gone on listening to organisations, families and parents, but listening to children describing their own experiences sometimes brings out things that the Government and even those organisations would not have thought of.

In terms of the wider groups, I have been able to do a little bit of this, even though it is not quite in my portfolio. However, the right reverend Prelate’s right reverend friend the Bishop of Derby very kindly invited me up to Derby to meet families at a family hub and to look at what the local authority and the faith groups were doing. Every time this happens, I am blown away by the resilience of individual families and the power of local communities, faith groups and local authorities to work together to make the lives of their communities better. The more we can engage with that and the more we can hear their voices, the better we are going to do this.