Clause 1
Child Poverty Bill
10:30 am
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work and Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman makes an absolutely fair and proper point, as he often does. I am not someone who seeks extra targets for the sake of it, and I accept his general point. In particular, when we come on to part 2 of the Bill, which deals with local government, my colleagues and I may want to include fewer targets and give local authorities in particular slightly more freedom in their approach. Hopefully, the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West will support us in that.
My worry, as the Committee heard extensively during the witness sessions, centres on the danger of keeping the current targets alone. They may drive policy in the wrong direction, keeping it in the area of income transfer—important as that is—without dealing with some of the serious issues that cause families to be in poverty in the first place. We do not propose imposing extra targets in the Bill lightly—we do so for a serious reason. We think that it will get to the heart of what we are all about in this Committee, which is turning lives around in a serious and substantial way. We fear that the four targets in the Bill alone might not do that, because the temptation, as has been said in Committee, could be just to whack out tax credits in 2018-19. Even the hon. Member for Northavon himself said that that might be the case.