Child Poverty Bill

Part of the debate – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:00 pm on 22 October 2009.

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Charlotte Pickles: Family breakdown is both a cause and a consequence of poverty, but I think that it is probably a significant cause of child poverty. You asked whether we should give more money to people at the point of separation—you said divorce, but a lot of the families never marry in the first place. I find that very interesting because that is simply saying that we accept that all those families are going to break down so we should just pick up the pieces. That is one of the greatest challenges we have had with current policy, or policy over the past couple of decades, which has not focused on prevention.

I think that what we should be doing is investing a great deal more. I do not mean just money, although Reverend Paul Nicolson obviously mentioned a couple penalty, which would be a great place to start in terms of trying to take away one of the disincentives to being in a stable two-parent family. We need to invest much more in early intervention, parenting programmes and in strengthening couple relationships. If we do that, we would probably find that it has a great impact on child poverty.