Child Poverty Bill
12:00 pm
Q160 1Steve Webb (Northavon) (LD): What some of us would like to do, because you have kindly provided evidence, is follow through on some of the questions you have asked relating to the Bill. I will start with Charlotte and the Centre for Social Justice. Your “Dynamic Benefits” report is very helpful. We are very grateful and have some interesting ideas about earnings disregards and so on. You have a set of proposals that cost £2 billion or £3 billion but your argument is that over the long term you will get that money back, as 600,000 people will find jobs because you have removed barriers to work. That is my understanding. Can you clarify for us whether your model says that there would be 600,000 more jobs for those people to go into, or would those 600,000 people take jobs that other people would otherwise have had? Have you costed in the benefits that you would then have to pay to those 600,000 who would not be in work?