Clause 24
Child Poverty Bill
4:30 pm
John Howell (Henley, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment 63, in clause 24, page 14, line 7, leave out from ‘of’ to ‘section’ in line 8.
I will not detain the Committee for long. The amendment is and always was intended to probe an issue that was covered in some detail this morning. I wish to illustrate the difficulties that were raised particularly by the local government representatives at their evidence session. There is a problem in being able to show the relevance of the target that the amendment would delete in the local government context. We considered that in some detail this morning in relation to Paul Carter’s evidence and the difficulty over the 48,000 children. We discussed it in terms of proxy targets, which covered quite a lot of the issue. It will still be useful to give the Minister the opportunity to justify a little more clearly than she did this morning the relevance of the target to local government officers, who succinctly expressed the difficulties of meeting it.