Clause 3
Child Poverty Bill
11:45 am
Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour)
It is a great pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Mr. Key. I start by congratulating the Ministers in charge of the Bill, because it is the first time that there have been specific requirements for housing for children. I recognise that, and pay a great tribute to them.
One of my purposes in tabling the amendments is to beef up the provision: to take it from what I call the undergrowth that lies behind the Bill and put it on the face of the Bill. I would also like some reassurance from Ministers about what the intentions are and how the provisions on material deprivation should be treated if, in future years, there are efforts to use such provisions to improve housing for children. Of course, comments made in Committee and recorded in Hansard can be used in legal interpretations in court regarding what should happen to children in bad housing. I am looking for some specific assurances, and I have raised some of these issues with Ministers previously.
One of the reasons why the amendments are necessary is the lack of clarity about exactly what is intended with some of the housing provisions in that undergrowth behind the Bill. Although the list of 21 items that are regarded as contributing to material deprivation contains a number that relate to housing and children, they do not sit very high in the legislative hierarchy. I thought that material deprivation indicators would be in the regulations. However, looking at some of the support papers, there is a policy statement for them. The list of 21 goods and services, which has apparently been used for some time and is cited in the documents, are
“currently being updated...to ensure that the list of items used reflect contemporary standards of living. That is why a statement of policy intent has been provided rather than draft regulations.”
It would be very helpful to have some assurances on that.
Equally, in the needs assessment regulations that are due to come in next year, assuming the legislation is passed, the reference to what local authorities should be doing on housing also seems to be slack, as it mentions an assessment of the role of housing, transport and other services provided by the local authority or partner authorities and the impact that that has on child poverty. That seems to be a very slight reference to implementing something that is very important for child poverty and for children living in poverty. There is no dispute at all about the importance of housing to children and to poor households. There is no dispute at all about the fact that it is absolutely right that housing should be one of the factors listed under material deprivation.
In “Every Child Matters”—the basic document that started a lot of the Government’s reforms on children’s policy—homelessness was listed above unemployment as the prime risk factor for children. It could just as well have been housing conditions, because homeless families live in bed-and-breakfast accommodation and so on. There was a real failure, in the early stages of Every Child Matters, to operationalise the risk factor that homelessness and poor housing created for children. The efforts to do so, by having joint protocols for the local authorities that cater for children—the county councils and the district councils—have not worked and I have tabled amendments so that that can be considered later.
If we look at the concerns about poor housing and its impact on poor children, there is a knock-on effect—for example, children have to have somewhere to do their homework. In the list of priorities, I was surprised that under the items of material deprivation from the child’s point of view, there is nothing about having somewhere to do homework. There is a wonderful provision stating that the child should be able to have
“friends round for tea or a snack once a fortnight.”
For disorganised mothers who work, that is quite a challenge. Obviously, if someone is going to visit like that, the child has to have a home to bring them to. For a lot of poor children today, the material deprivation is compounded by the fact that they simply do not have a home to which they can take a friend back for tea. Housing has to take priority over a number of other factors of material deprivation, which is why I have tabled an amendment stating that that should be in the Bill.
There are other bits of legislation that deal with issues relating to housing; for example, homelessness legislation and the decent homes standard. The commitment in the list of items of material deprivation that I would like to include in the Bill, concerns overcrowding from the child’s point of view. There should be
“enough bedrooms for every child of 10 or over to share their bedroom only with siblings of the same sex.”
That is a wonderful commitment. It would be nice to have that in the Bill, instead of tucked away in a list, the status of which is unclear and which is being revised. That is a whole new standard of overcrowding, which my hon. Friend the Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North and I have never seen in any of the discussions that we have had over the years. It is far adrift from the standard picture in other legislation, which is based on the 1935 standards of overcrowding. Civil servants never realise that the definition of overcrowding that they say that local authorities have is an allocation policy; it is not a transfer policy. That affects many families up and down the country. A couple with a baby will be given a one-bedroom flat, but when the baby grows up and the couple have two or three children, they cannot get moved, because there is nothing to say that that family is overcrowded.