Child Poverty Act 2010 (Persistent Poverty Target) Regulations 2014

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness—my noble friend, as we steal one another’s best lines. I concur with just about everything that she has said except to say that, while I yield to no one in having demanded money over the last 30 years for social security purposes, I am getting quite frightened about the national debt; £1.449 trillion is an enormous sum of money. You may have to configure responses to these kinds of policies a little more carefully than I have been doing.

Having said that, however, I would like to gently poke the Minister in the ribs, politically speaking. The pupil premium has been a significant potential success but I am not sure that we can be certain that this is replicated throughout the United Kingdom. We will need to watch that very carefully in future. Weighing in the balance some of the work done by the IFS, of which I am a council member, the persistent reductions in the social security spend over the past five years have been enormous. There is a lot of tension here and we have to do all that we can to remain positive and ambitious.

I concur with the view expressed by just about everyone in the consultation, including the noble Baroness who has just spoken, that 5% would have been a more ambitious target. That is an opportunity missed. I am trying to understand better the basis on which the target has been set. I think that the circumstances have changed a lot since 2010. Along with other colleagues, I was responsible for the implementation of the Child Poverty Act 2010, and I thought that it was the right thing to do. It was much more focused on money than it now is, so I can understand the coalition Government’s intention to try to broaden the approach to deal with some of the underlying consequences, but it is a bit disappointing.

I know that this is not easy but at paragraph 7.2 of the Explanatory Memorandum there is a confession that the Government,

“are not yet in a position”,

to take some of these new child poverty measures forward. Can my noble friend the Minister give us any expectation of when that work may be completed? He is right to say that we are all slightly blindsided by the fact that the British Household Panel Survey data finished in 2008, so we will probably have to wait until the end of 2015 to see the data that we really need. If that is the reason for the delay, I will understand; it might be impossible to make any sensible assessments until that point. However, that leaves it rather late to try to affect things by the end of fiscal 2020, which I suppose means achieving a target by 31 March 2021.

However, that is still a very short timescale. The legislature is right to say to the Executive, “There may well be compelling reasons why we are hastening slowly here”, but it is unfortunate that we still do not have a clear idea what the Government are really driving at—an argument reflected, reasonably, by the Scrutiny Committee. From a position of relative poverty standing at 17% in 2012-13—although it may be 27%, because of the difference in before and after housing costs—trying to get to 7%, or even 5%, over the period from 2017-18 to 2021 is a good trick, if we can do it.

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[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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[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?

[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.