Lord Fink
Main Page: Lord Fink (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Fink's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Freud
We will clearly go on reporting on the HBAI measure. As a legal target it is very dangerous, and we have just seen why. In 2011, the IFS projected a figure which was wrong by 5 million children. The IFS thought that there would be 5 million more children in 2013-14 than there actually were when the figures came out. If it is a legal target, you have to start working to reduce your poverty by 5 million children—sorry, half a million children, not 5 million. That is completely unforecastable and implies huge unnecessary costs on the state.
Lord Fink (Con)
My Lords, how do the Government intend to help the 390,000 children who live in workless households? What measures do they have to do this?
Lord Freud
The number of children in workless households has been coming down rapidly. It has come down by 390,000 and is now at a record low. We are looking to encourage more families back into the workplace through the financial incentives around universal credit, the new national living wage—clearly, a very direct incentive—and free childcare, and we are working to boost the number of apprenticeships from 2 million under the last Government to 3 million under this one.