Child Poverty

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on child poverty in the United Kingdom.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, the IFS report is an interesting addition to the work on tackling child poverty in the UK, but the Government do not believe that it is possible to predict poverty levels with any certainty so far away. Poverty figures rely on the performance of the economy, on people’s behaviours and on government policy. As the report acknowledges, these cannot be predicted effectively over this timescale.

[Lord Dubs]

My Lords, it is disappointing that the Minister chose to brush aside a very sound piece of work, which I am sure he has read and looked at in great detail—or his officials have. Is it not alarming that a reputable organisation with sound analytical methods has predicted that child poverty is likely to increase by 1 million by 2020? Even if the figures are a bit out, the fact is that they are going up alarmingly, and child poverty is such a damaging blight on our society.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I have read the report with great interest and not relied on my officials. There are a lot of very valuable things in it. One of the most interesting things, as the noble Lord will be aware, is the uncertainty caused by the way in which absolute poverty is measured. The report says that because the rather unreliable RPI measure is used, the figure is 10 percentage points higher, whereas if the CPI measure were used it would be only 1.5 percentage points higher. The report states that we should look at that very closely, which we are doing.