Clause 10 — Responsibility for children and young persons

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Prime Minister – in the House of Commons at 6:45 pm on 1 February 2012.

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Photo of Kate Green Kate Green Shadow Minister (Equalities) 6:45, 1 February 2012

The point is that a system is being established whereby the parent with care must access the system. There will be a discussion at that point about the process by which that approach to the agency is made. There is no difficulty at all at that point in taking a decision about the responsibility and behaviour of the parent making that application. I cannot understand why the Government think that it is perfectly okay for other officials in the DWP to make decisions on whether people are making appropriate efforts to make themselves available for employment, but not for a decision to be taken on whether a parent has properly engaged in a process of seeking to reach agreement with a non-resident parent.

I also want to speak briefly about the Government’s proposal to amend the obligation on the child poverty target under the Child Poverty Act. The current obligation is for the Government to report on the progress that must be made to achieve child poverty targets—targets to which every party in this House has signed up. There will now be a far weaker requirement simply to report on proposed measures. In other words, there will be an obligation on the Government to report on what they might or might not do, but absolutely no obligation to report on whether it works or on what difference it makes. That undermines what lies at the heart of the Act, which was a genuine wish across the House in the previous Parliament to see real progress in bringing down child poverty and for every politician in this House to be accountable for that outcome.

I very much regret such a weakening of the Child Poverty Act. In future, the Government could legally produce a child poverty strategy that makes no reference to the number of children in poverty—an extremely important measure in driving progress—and has no clear goals for how the proposed actions will reduce that number. When the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the cumulative impact of the Government’s welfare reforms on other measures will be to drive up child poverty between now and 2015 and onwards to 2020, one has to wonder whether the proposal is not a rather cynical and calculating step on the part of the Government to wriggle out of an obligation that they know they are not on track to meet.