Child Poverty

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Yes, my Lords. One of the peculiar things about what happened under the previous Government was that the Gini coefficient went up to an all-time record. It has moved slightly in the past year but not in any meaningful way. It is important that we address that as part of the context of looking at our poverty approaches but, as noble Lords opposite will know, this is not an easy thing to do.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, the Minister referred to the importance of getting people back into work and I agree with that. Will he cast his mind back three or four years to a document that he wrote when the previous Government were in office? He wrote:

“The Government”—

that is a Labour Government—

“has made strong, and in some respects remarkable, progress over the last ten years … The New Deals have been enormously successful—helping over 1.7 million people into work since 1998. The creation of Jobcentre Plus in 2002 extended the rights and responsibilities regime for people on all benefits … and is widely seen as having been a model for effective public service delivery”.

Does the Minister still hold to that view?

[Lord Freud]

I used the expression “in some respects” and I stand by that. In some respects there was a great deal of success. Under the previous Government we discovered that active labour market policies worked, and when they were introduced—they were actually introduced by the previous Government—and pushed in they had a one-off effect. However, we are left with a huge problem of people on inactive benefits which the previous Government did nothing to solve. We are now trying to do that.