Clause 5
Child Poverty Bill
4:00 pm
Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment 23, in clause 5, page 2, line 37, leave out “2015” and insert “2012”.
Lest I be misunderstood or thought grudging, I should say that I think that the presence of a range of poverty targets in the Bill is entirely welcome—with the exception of the target that we have just discussed. The inclusion of material deprivation is a welcome step, as is the inclusion of persistent poverty in clause 5. They are all good things that future Governments will come to rue, I am sure.
Amendment 23 relates to one of the details of the persistent poverty target, namely the date, set out in clause 5(3), by which the target percentage has to be prescribed by regulations. When I first read the clause, I could not believe what I saw. Here we are in 2009, legislating for a process that we are already meant to be halfway through, and we will be three quarters of the way through the process before we have even decided what the target is on one of the four key measures. That seems a bit slow.
There will be arguments about data, I am sure, and I welcome the fact that, as I understand it, the Government are commissioning what is known in the academic literature as a socking great panel survey, which will be much bigger than what we had before. I remember working on the British household panel survey in years gone by. Wonderful though it was, it was certainly small. Given the annual panel attrition, and given that we started with only 5,000 households, we soon got to small sample sizes. The idea of basing that indicator on something much bigger gets me salivating. It is entirely a good thing.
Having said that, it is not a good enough excuse to say, “We have to put the panel into the field, and then we have to have another wave and yet another wave. We then have to crunch the numbers and think about it for a few more years, and then we will have a target.” The target should bite on Government policy, but how can it do so if it does not exist until halfway through the remainder of the period?
How can the child poverty commission recommend action that will enable us to hit the targets in clause 5 if it has not decided what they are? Given that we are talking about some of the most difficult poverty to tackle, namely persistent poverty—there is a clue in the title, as it were—leaving the setting of the target until five years down the track seems problematic. It is an oversimplification to say that we would be just leaving the issue; clearly, one would want to be doing something about persistent poverty, anyway, but how much “something” would you need to do, and for which groups? We will not know until 2015. The Minister will say that subsection (3) only says that the regulations should be made not later than 2015, but that is an awful lot of leeway.
Our modest amendment simply brings the target forward to 2012, not because that is the year of the Olympics, but because that gives the Government half as much time as they want—they want six years, and we want to give them three. That is not a very scientific reason either, but we are trying to probe why the Government think that they need six years. The gist of the argument is that the target will be really difficult to meet. We are dealing with intractable, persistent poverty that requires an awful lot of work and concentration of effort. If we do not know what the targets are until halfway through the period, how on earth, in that final five years, are things to be done? Yes, we can start now, but if we do not know the scale of what we are even trying to achieve until six years down the track, what hope have we got of achieving it? I encourage the Committee to accept our amendment.