Clause 5
Child Poverty Bill
4:15 pm
Stephen Timms (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; East Ham, Labour)
The amendment would require the target to be set before 2012, rather than before 2015. I just point out that the wording in the Bill is “before”, not “by”. In other words, in order to meet the timetable set out in the Bill, that target would have to be prescribed by regulations made by 2014, so we are not talking about setting the target halfway—the whole halfway, anyway—through the period, although we are talking about a fair chunk of the first half of the decade.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Northavon for welcoming the inclusion of the persistent poverty target. I agree with him that the number of children below the poverty line in three years out of four is a very important and telling piece of data. The target was welcomed by the witnesses who gave evidence last week, and it will enable us to focus attention on families who spend significant periods of time below the poverty line.
The reason for the delay until 2014—or possibly earlier; the target percentage would have to be set by 2014—is, as the hon. Gentleman anticipated, the new, larger survey. I note that he is salivating over it; let me give him a little more information about it. As he knows, the survey currently used to measure persistent poverty is the British household panel survey. That is being subsumed, from this year, within a new survey, Understanding Society—a larger survey, as he said—which we intend to use to measure persistent poverty in the future. The first full set of data from that survey will be available in 2011, and the second full set in 2012.
I hope that I can persuade the hon. Gentleman that it would be technically impossible to comply with his proposal, which is that the target be set before 2012. We will simply not have the second set of data by then, and once we receive it, it will need to be analysed if we are to come up with a sensible and intelligent target for persistent poverty. We could argue that we need more than two years of data, but we want to deal with the issue on the basis of the first two years. I hope that the Committee accepts that we need at least two years of data if we are to come up with a sensible target.