UK: Poverty

Lord German Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we have a benefits system that is designed to provide the basic needs of people who are poor. Clearly, there is increasing local provision of food banks. Actually, it expanded very dramatically under the previous Government. Interestingly, the really big expansion has been since September 2011 when jobcentre advisers were allowed for the first time to direct people towards them.

[Lord German]

My Lords, relative measures of poverty sometimes have bizarre consequences. An example has happened recently. As the economy contracted, hundreds of thousands of children were notionally lifted out of poverty. What credence does the Minister give to a better and wider form of measurement of poverty that looks at interventions and at ways of removing barriers for children, such as that proposed by Save the Children, which would allow things such as the pupil premium to be included in the measure so that we fully understand the impact that these things have on child poverty?

[Lord Freud]

My noble friend makes an important point. I should make it clear that I believe in the relative poverty measure, which is a way of measuring what happens over the medium-term period, although there have been some rather perverse impacts in the past couple of years in the current recession. What is really important is that we drive our attention to the underlying causes of poverty. That is what the current consultation is about. We will be reporting on how to tackle it in the spring/summer.