Clause 8
Child Poverty Bill
1:00 pm
Judy Mallaber (Amber Valley, Labour)
I am delighted to have discovered just now, Mr. Key, that your daughter is one of my constituents, which is a very nice thing to say. I am sure that you had impeccable child care for her when she was being brought up, which brings me back to the subject that I was talking about before the Committee adjourned. I will not be long.
I was supporting my hon. Friend the Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North in saying that we should include child care as a specific point in the Bill. I oppose putting in a load of amendments that cover specific categories of people or geographic areas, but child care, as a specific service, deserves to be put explicitly in the Bill. I was of that mind before I heard my hon. Friend’s speech, but after she went through some of the many complexities that need dealing with, I was even more convinced that child care should stand as a separate aspect of the Bill and a separate building block.
The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland, intervened just before the Committee adjourned, to reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North on her concerns about the migration of lone parents between income support and jobseeker’s allowance and the difficulty in relation to child care issues. That made me realise even more one of the many complexities involved, how all the various issues that we are talking about, including a number of the building blocks in subsection (5), interrelate and why it is therefore important that child care should stand as a separate item. Child care is fundamental to dealing with the issues of child poverty and the family relationships that we talked about earlier, and to how we deal with the issues in the Bill and meet our objectives.
I will not rehearse all the arguments, because my hon. Friend covered many of them. I shall refer just to two other issues that make me concerned that child care should be highlighted separately. The county of Derbyshire, which is my county and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash, has been at the forefront of promoting and taking up the Government’s initiatives on child care in recent years and of promoting Sure Start schemes. I am deeply concerned that if child care does not have the prominence that it needs, that could—even though there will be good intentions and good statements from other political parties—be under threat. That will be very damaging to the cause of trying to eliminate child poverty.
Unfortunately, we have just lost the elections in our county and I do not trust the current regime. Specific ideological issues are raised about how we proceed. I know that the Opposition say that they, too, support Sure Start, but that would be in a very different way, because they plan to cut money from that programme. They say that they will deal with it by increasing vastly the number of health visitors, but by removing other outreach workers; they will also cut that scheme.