Child Poverty Act 2010 (Persistent Poverty Target) Regulations 2014

Lord Freud Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Freud]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Child Poverty Act 2010 (Persistent Poverty Target) Regulations 2014.

Relevant documents: 10th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, 11th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

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

My Lords, the regulations laid before the Committee today introduce a new persistent child poverty target, as required by the Child Poverty Act 2010. At the end of this Parliament, as at the start, the coalition Government remain committed to tackling the key drivers of child poverty and improving the lives of the most vulnerable people in our society. We remain committed to the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020 and, despite challenging economic conditions and fiscal restraint, we are making significant progress: under this Government, 300,000 fewer children live in relative poverty.

The evidence is clear that work remains the best route out of poverty. We know that children are about three times as likely to be in poverty if they live in a workless family. Therefore, at the centre of our child poverty strategy is a commitment to tackling worklessness, and it is clear that our reforms are making a real difference. With employment up by nearly 1.7 million since 2010, there are now around 390,000 fewer children in workless households, and both the number and the proportion of children in workless households are at the lowest levels on record. Through our structural reforms to welfare, we are lifting people out of poverty, putting in the right incentives to get people into work and to make work pay.

We are not stopping there. We are helping people to progress in work through universal credit and the next phase of the Work Programme with a clear focus on skill development. Before they reach the workplace, this Government’s commitment to improving educational outcomes has seen poor children do better than ever at school. Between 2010 and 2013, the proportion of children on free school meals getting good GCSEs, including English and maths, has increased by 7% to 38%. These are substantial leaps in educational attainment, which will make a real and lasting difference to children’s lives as they develop.

Today, we are publishing the Government’s response to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s State of the Nation 2014 report. This reiterates our goal to end child poverty and achieve lasting change for the poorest in our society. This, along with the regulations before the Committee today, demonstrates our ongoing commitment to tackling child poverty and helps us to meet our obligations under the Child Poverty Act 2010. The Government firmly believe that, in the long term, a revised set of child poverty measures are needed which underline our commitment to reducing child poverty but better reflect the evidence about its underlying causes. We are not yet in a position to put these new measures forward. In the absence of these new measures, we therefore remain committed to meeting our existing obligations under the Act and to introducing a persistent child poverty target by the end of this year.

This fourth child poverty measure will complement the three existing child poverty measures which are already in statute. These are on relative poverty, absolute poverty, and combined low income and material deprivation. There are compelling reasons for introducing a persistent poverty measure. This Government recognise that persistent poverty can be particularly harmful to children’s life chances. We know that children living in persistent and long-term poverty have a radically different experience of growing up, compared to other children. The longer that a child remains in poverty, the more likely it is that he or she will experience poor outcomes such as social exclusion, below average attainment and reduced life chances. This was a view shared in the majority of responses to our consultation on the target. Reponses from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission and others put particular emphasis on the damaging effects of persistent poverty and urged the Government to continue to put this at the centre of policy ambition.

We are steadfast in our commitment to addressing child poverty in all its forms and our Child Poverty Strategy 2014-17, published in June, sets out the action that we are taking as a Government. We will continue to focus action on breaking the cycle of persistent poverty and exploring what further steps can be taken to reduce persistent poverty as far and as fast as possible. So in June this year, the Government launched a consultation on setting a persistent child poverty target of less than 7%. This means that the percentage of children living in households that are in relative poverty in at least three of the four years up to 2020-21 must be less than 7% of all children in the UK.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee queried why we are not setting this target at zero per cent. According to all measures, child poverty is assessed using robust and well established statistical surveys to capture information about household income. However, like all sample surveys, this one contains some naturally occurring error. For example, some people will give inaccurate reports of their income when interviewed, or are between jobs at the exact point when they respond to the survey. It is therefore not statistically feasible for these surveys to report that zero per cent of children are in poverty and does not make sense to set a target at this level. That is the same reason that the existing Act’s targets were not set at zero per cent.

Our decision to choose a target of less than 7% is both evidence-based and consistent. First, it is based on analysis of the historical relationship between persistent poverty and relative poverty. Secondly, it is consistent with the ambitious relative poverty target of less than 10%, as set out in the Child Poverty Act 2010. The evidence shows that in a given year, levels of persistent poverty are typically 50% to 70% of relative poverty. According to past trends, therefore, when relative poverty reaches around 10% persistent poverty should be somewhere between 5% and 7%.

However, we must also take into account how future trends might affect the relationship between relative and persistent child poverty. As the number of children in relative poverty reduces, the children from harder-to-reach families who face most disadvantage are likely to make up a greater proportion of the group. These children are more likely to suffer from persistent poverty, which means that the historical relationship between relative child poverty and persistent poverty is likely to shift. Therefore, when levels of relative child poverty are about 10%, children in persistent poverty could make up a high proportion, if not the entirety, of the group. In such an event, the proportion of children in persistent poverty could be much closer to 10% of all children.

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With regard to tackling the poverty that children suffer, a tighter target of 5% would have been useful. We have an indication of the Government’s real intent. Any good things that the Government are doing in this or any other field have to be seen against a background of the massive switch in income from the poor to the rich that has taken place over the past four years.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I wish that the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, had not gone rather crudely political on what is a difficult area, especially as the facts that he used are simply not true. There has been an absolute cut in income for the richest 20% and an increase for the lowest, as has been put out by the Government. This is not the forum to have that kind of crude debate and I do not want that.

Some really important points have been made today. This is a difficult area at a difficult time. My noble friend Lord Kirkwood looked at the national debt and blanched, for very good reason. I look down my nose at him because, when looking at the performance of the last Government on poverty, one saw that they achieved the trajectory for people who were out of work, and they were able to do that through income transfers, but for people at the next level who were just in work and at the next level of income, there was very little movement. That is the problem that we are addressing. We are looking at a problem that cannot be solved just by moving money around particular areas. I commend the noble Lord to look through those figures, which are very interesting and illustrate the fact that we have got to the limits of what you can do just by income transfers, which is what the previous Government did.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I was not part of that Government, but will the noble Lord not accept that part of their child poverty strategy was also to move people into work? Part of the problem with the current situation, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, is that, although it may not be completely new, this is certainly the first time where more people in poverty are in work than out of work. We all agree that work is a good route out of poverty; but it is not necessarily a route out of poverty. Both Governments have faced the same problem of what you do with a labour market which is not providing enough to keep people out of poverty.

[Lord Freud]

I speak here from a somewhat privileged position, in that I advised the last Government in exactly this area and now speak for the current Government on it. So I am in a position—

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

A very Liberal position.

[Lord Freud]

So I am in a position, slightly embarrassingly, to do this. The trouble with statistics is that you can get very confused by them. When you have had a massive increase in employment and a lot of people entering the market—2 million people into the private sector—you have some very substantial distorting data relating to those new entrants, which change the averages. You have also had massive changes because of the biggest financial crash since the 1930s—it used to be since the 1920s. I looked through the figures, and one-third of the fall in average income, for instance, can be roughly explained, as far as I can tell, by the reduction in bonuses in the City. Before one looks at these average figures, one really needs to dig under them to understand them. Otherwise, people in the Opposition will get into some cheap points that do not really stand up and which will just look foolish when people do the research properly, which they will do in the years to come.

I come off the generality into the specifics and the very difficult set of problems involved in solving child poverty, which we remain absolutely committed to. I will go through the points raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, asked about the qualifying households. Surveys work by taking data from private households, so there are a relatively small number of children—it is a small number—who are not in there. They are, as she said, children in children’s homes, Travellers and one or two other categories, as she mentioned.

The after-housing-costs point has been very thoroughly debated. My noble friend will remember the thoroughness of some of those debates; the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was there too. Costs before housing are the set of measures in the Act, which is why we are using them. To change the measures would be to rewrite the primary legislation. Also, clearly, if you use a different base, you might think about what the right percentage figure is. That is the reason that we use before housing costs as a standard measure and as an international comparison. It was chosen because after housing costs reflect, or can reflect, choices that people make to spend more on rent or mortgages because that is what they value more than other things. Therefore there was a good reason that that set of measures was chosen.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I am sorry to intervene again. Before the Minister moves on, my understanding was that although the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, mentioned the delay because of the survey data, he was asking about what the actual measures are, and that is separate from the survey data. There was a big consultation about a set of measures that I personally did not think were measures of poverty. That is also what most people said in response so, fortunately, that time the Government did take note of the consultation and withdrew it. However, as the commission says, they are still distancing themselves from the measures that they have without coming forward with a more acceptable set of measures to complement them. The question is: what has happened to them? Have they got lost? There have been rumours about the Treasury having had something to do with it. What has happened to those complementary measures?

[Lord Freud]

In the long term, the Government think that we need a revised set of child poverty measures which would better reflect the evidence about poverty’s underlying causes and where we need to target action most—the kind of thing that my noble friend Lord Farmer, in particular, was talking about, but we are not currently in a position to put those new measures forward. As our consultation, which the noble Baroness mentioned, showed, this is a complex area and there are a variety of views. I am afraid that that is all I am in a position to say at this stage.

On the noble Lord’s point about how these measures are made up; clearly, both relative and persistent poverty levels depend in part on how both median income changes and how those with low incomes improve relative to the median. That is just how the Act was made. We spent an awfully long time debating during the passage of the Bill a general level of discomfort with just this mechanistic approach to this kind of measure. That is just how it is, and that is what the Act shows, but the fundamentals are that we need to maintain our focus on helping those on lower incomes, which means helping people into work—or more work, which is what universal credit will do—and in help with living costs.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

The Minister is being very helpful, and I do not want to detain the Committee. Presumably Section 6(3) of the Child Poverty Act 2010, as I understand it, requires the Government to set a figure, which has been set at 7%. However, that is all it does. Presumably, the Government, on cause shown if the evidence changed, could in subsequent years change that target. Am I right about that?

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[Lord Freud]

I actually said something rather careful—that we will keep the evidence under review. We will get some up-to-date evidence next year about the persistent poverty target in relation to the relative poverty targets. Clearly, we will be able to monitor that and see how it moves, but we will have set the targets here in these regulations.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

The question I am asking is: are we stuck with the 7% target until 31 March 2021?

[Lord Freud]

The targets are in secondary legislation, and it would be up to a future Government, for which at this stage I cannot talk, to change secondary legislation. In practice, yes; it is a changeable target.

As I said in my opening remarks, we are committed to tackling child poverty, and we have a strong record. Relative child poverty is at its lowest level for 30 years—a fact that will perhaps surprise the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy. There are 300,000 fewer children in relative poverty since the election, and now 390,000 fewer children are growing up in workless families. We are especially committed to tackling persistent poverty and to breaking the cycle which sees poor children grow up to become poor adults. That is why I am proud to present these regulations before the Committee today, which set an ambitious persistent poverty target of less than 7% of all children in the UK, meeting our obligations under the Child Poverty Act 2010.

[Lord McAvoy]

The noble Lord did not respond to many of my points because, as I understand it, he dismissed them as being wrong. Can I respectfully ask him if he could help me by writing to me, outlining what parts of my speech were factually wrong and what the answers were to them? I am sure that he would not want to be thought to be making a cheap accusation—a cheap note—and I am sure that he will recognise his responsibility by writing to me, giving the details of what he said.

[Lord Freud]

I will, with great pleasure, note down and send to the noble Lord the figures, which I think I have used in the past, about how the income of the richest 20% has moved relative to the poorest 20% under this Government. I will provide him with those precise figures. I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Motion agreed.