Poverty

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I apologise to the House and to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for being a little late at the beginning of this debate, having missed the ending of the previous one. In compensation for that, I shall not speak for very long, which may be of some comfort to the House.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for raising this issue but, unfortunately, I cannot agree with him about the Child Poverty Act, on which we both worked so hard in the previous Session of Parliament. I am afraid that I consider it to be a bad Act and I ask whether the Government will either repeal or amend it. I ask that not because I am in any way opposed to resolving the problems of child poverty or promoting the well-being of children but because that is not what the Act does with any degree of effectiveness.

First, the Child Poverty Act is about family income rather than child poverty. Secondly, it is about inequality rather than poverty. I think that we should decide whether in that legislation we are talking about inequality or poverty, as they may or may not both be evils. Poverty is certainly an evil and I think that there are circumstances in which inequality may be an evil. Thirdly, I do not think that we shall really ever achieve an answer to the problem of child poverty until we effectively take parents into partnership with us. It is not an issue on which parents have the right to do as much they would like, and then the state has to step in and do all the rest. Somehow we seem to have failed to engage the less committed parents in our society. We have failed to help them to understand the obligations of parenthood and to co-operate in looking after their children. The noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who is no longer in his place, and others have mentioned that the most disadvantaged and the poorest children come from broken and chaotic households.

I mention in passing that a number of noble Lords— including the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh—brought before the House some very interesting statistics, implying that they are perhaps causal, one for the other. One has to be extremely careful about using that argument. Perhaps the House would forgive me if I mention a birthday card I received on my last birthday. It said, “Birthdays are good for you: the more you have, the longer you live”. That is a perfectly convincing fact. We should be looking at child poverty, at the impact on children and on children’s well-being and saying to ourselves, “Can we evolve a better society and a better form of legislation through which to commit ourselves to improving the lot of children in the context of poverty?”.