Child Poverty Bill
12:00 pm
Neil O'Brien: The good thing about your question was your point about the problem being complex. The good thing in the Bill is the broad-based strategy to deal with that. The bad thing in the Bill, from my point of view, is the narrowness of the legally binding targets. What you have is not a child poverty target; it is an income inequality target. That strongly drives you relentlessly towards downstream intervention to give people income, rather than upstream intervention to tackle the causes.
For example, the IFS points out that you could spend £4 billion and hit the target by giving people more through the tax credit system. But would that be the best use of £4 billion for tackling long-term child poverty? That is less clear. The strategy recognises that, but the targets do not. It would be better to have a set of targets, or a set of indicators, that are more broadly based on opportunities for jobless households, low educational attainment, substandard housing, infant mortality, teenage smoking, teenage pregnancy and children in care who do not get adopted. The Government have recognised that there is a tension there. Yvette Cooper said that the child poverty targets had never just been about poverty, but had always been about narrowing unfair inequalities. That might be a good thing, but there is a trade-off between tackling inequalities and tackling child poverty.
The other problem with rather narrow, income-based targets is that they do not tell you too much about the depth of poverty. Because incomes cluster just above the line—you know all this stuff—it is possible to bring about big changes in the headline rate by giving people just enough money to get over the line. In a sense, it is an arbitrary line. If you look at a measure based on 50 per cent. of median income, you would have the same number of people in poverty as in 1997. If you look at 40 per cent. of median income after household costs, it looks like there is more poverty. I am not saying that there is overall more poverty, I am just saying that it is, in a sense, an ambiguous and arbitrary measure. You might be better off tying your targets to your broader strategy and using those concrete measures instead.