Clause 8
Child Poverty Bill
9:15 am
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work and Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I am not sure that we have talked about general options; we are talking about a general philosophical approach of providing more flexibility within the welfare system. I do not necessarily agree with the Minister that a flexible system is necessarily more expensive than a rigid system. There are costs inherent in a rigid system, if it keeps people out of the labour market, because the Minister’s Department has to go on paying benefits. It is a complicated area. I recognise what she is saying and she is right to make that point, but this is not by any means the end of the debate. It will be the subject of further study by her party and mine for many years to come. I shall move on because there are many amendments to speak to.
Amendment 58 deals with the well-being of children, which we have touched on throughout the Bill. This is specifically a child poverty Bill; it looks at the income levels available to families in which children live. It is not a Bill about children’s well-being specifically, but we would all agree that poverty and well-being are intimately linked. If nothing else, fostering children’s well-being is likely to be beneficial to the outcomes of those children when they in turn become parents. The National Children’s Bureau, among others, has said that adding a reference to well-being would ensure that the Government consider the breadth of services that can impact on the quality of a child’s life.
Amendment 2 covers three different areas, all of which I will speak to. The reference to families with disabilities covers a distinct group in which there is a particular concentration of child poverty, as every study on child poverty shows again and again. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, among others, has called for and will welcome amending the Bill to refer to disability. We referred to it in our earlier discussions on the disability living allowance. I commend the amendment to Ministers for their consideration. The Secretary of State will have to consider the issue specifically when she formulates her strategy.
I make the same point about ethnic minorities. I am conscious that we need to be careful of the language we use, but, for example, there are phenomenally high rates of child poverty in the Bangladeshi community in London, perhaps for long-standing cultural reasons or due to language or attitudes towards all family members going out to work. We must recognise that a general UK-wide strategy may leave certain communities untouched. Again, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has welcomed that focus.
I want to talk about proposed new subsection (5)(e) in amendment 2, which refers to “reducing family breakdown”. I hope we can debate this in as consensual a way as possible, and I long for the day when this area of family policy is more or less agreed across the House. I am always troubled that it is an area of contention, as it is one on which I seek consensus. I was genuinely pleased when I picked up “Ending child poverty: making it happen”, which was brought out earlier this year by the Department for Work and Pensions from the child poverty unit, which has done tremendous work on bringing the Bill forward. All three references to strengthening families pleased me.
Page 12 of the document says:
“Family breakdown and crisis can make searching for work very difficult and also increase the risk of dropping out of the labour market.”
That is absolutely right; I was pleased to see that. Page 15, which addresses supporting parents, talks about strengthening the capabilities of parents. That is just the right the language and something I would back completely. Page 16 sets out the famous building blocks to try to eradicate child poverty, with the diagram that has been produced at all sorts of conferences. I was again pleased to see family rightly mentioned as one of those eight building blocks. I have referred before to the impact assessment, paragraph 2.6 of which says:
“Family breakdown may have caused the family to fall into poverty.”
Those statement are all from Government documents, so I was surprised when I looked at clause 8(5), and noticed that all the building blocks were there and named expect one: family. Curiously, family seems to have slipped through the net, and I do not know why. I was disappointed because I had thought that what the Government had been saying and their direction of travel had been encouraging.
I was also slightly discouraged during the evidence sessions when the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said:
“The Government are not wholly convinced that family breakdown is a cause of poverty”.
That worried me, so I came back with:
“Is it not the case that if your parents separate you are twice as likely to grow up in poverty as a child?”
The Minister replied:
“The data that we have show that there is a small downward blip at the point of a family breakdown”.——[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2009; c. 15-16, Q44-45.]
I said that we needed to look further into the data.