Clause 1
Child Poverty Bill
10:45 am
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work and Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I am not here to play a blame-allocation game. My purpose is to try to get the policy right for the future. Edna Speed, who travelled from the north-west to attend an evidence sitting, said that she hoped that she had not made a wasted journey and that the Committee would do the serious work to get the policy right for the future. There has been a tendency across Governments of both parties for far too long to use sticking-plasters as solutions and to send out ambulances without doing some of the long-term, tough—it is not easy—deep, preventive work that is necessary to deal with families in the constituency of the hon. Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North, as well as with families in my constituency and, in some cases, whole communities that have suffered severe inter-generational poverty. We are talking about long-term, deep, serious work, not quick headlines, and it is needed alongside the targets in clauses 2 to 5.