Child Poverty Bill
12:00 pm
Donald Hirsch: I agree with all that and I certainly agree that while having the Child Poverty Bill is helpful, because of the signals that that sends out, it can do very little on its own. Perhaps the most important thing in the Bill and the way that it is followed through is the requirement to have a specific broad strategy. Of course, everything will be on what that strategy is—how specific and how tough it is, and how much leverage it has.
There are several things that really have not been planned for in a coherent strategic way over the past decade, in terms of what is going to contribute to reducing child poverty. One of those regards the whole benefits and tax credit system. There is no systematic way to ensure that the amounts being received by families with children on low incomes even keeps up with rising incomes generally—when they do rise—let alone makes progress towards narrowing the gap, which is what would be required.
A second big one is about the types of jobs that people move into and the ways in which you can reduce in-work child poverty without an excessive burden on in-work tax credits. The third—on which, to be fair, there have been strategies but they have not proved adequate—is on child care and how genuinely adequate that is, in terms of making opportunities available to families.
I mentioned all those because they are three things in which something pretty big needs to happen. I would judge the effectiveness of a strategy by how tough it is on things like that in really planning forward to create a significant change, rather than just small changes at the margin.