Lord Flight
Main Page: Lord Flight (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Flight's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(11 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Freud
My Lords, I could not agree more. One of the most dismaying things that I have ever read is the 2007 UNICEF report that put us right at the bottom in terms of child well-being. The latest report from 2011 shows us crawling up four places, but we have a long way to go and we need to find the right ways in which to help children genuinely to get out of poverty.
Lord Flight
My Lords, is not the related problem of feral children who engage in gang warfare and drug dealing and whose parents are not parenting properly even more serious? The solution to that is shown to be provided increasingly by the new technical colleges which motivate such children and teach them a skill. They then start to want to learn generally. That is the sort of measure that really addresses our problems rather than just giving out money.
Lord Freud
My Lords, we are in the middle of a genuine consultation on how to tackle child poverty. Maintaining the income measure so that we know what is happening but getting at the measures that will make a real underlying difference to entrenched poverty is absolutely vital in that exercise.