New Clause 2
Child Poverty Bill
6:00 pm
Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
In the interests of not ending the harmony that we have enjoyed in Committee, I will support the hon. Gentleman’s new clause. Does he agree that having benchmarks for different sorts of families would allow us, for the first time, to assess whether the benefits structure disadvantages particular families? For example, the benefit levels for families with three children or with one child could be compared with the needs of such families. I do not have a strong feeling on whether the benefits system adequately compensates for the costs of additional children, so the benchmarks would help us to do that. That would give us some useful benchmarks for families with different numbers of children, or for pensioners as opposed to non-pensioners.