Q
84Mr.
Gauke: May I ask one final question? Kate Green, you said
that you saw the political pressure as the key driver in the Bill, as
opposed to the judicial review side of it, although you obviously
welcome that. Would the rest of you agree, or do you see being able to
take the Government to court if they fail to abide by an appropriate
strategy as the teeth of the Bill? Or is it the political pressure and
the greater focus on child poverty in the Bill that is the
key?
Neera
Sharma: I think that it is the political pressure,
but it is also the prospect that there will be strategies in place.
Also, the commission will have a key role, so we can hopefully speak to
the commission, which might call for witnesses. There will be
architecture in place for us to make our voices heard and to make
representations. If we feel that the strategy is not going to address
the issues that we think are pertinent to progress being made, we can
have input at that
stage.
Q
85Steve
Webb (Northavon) (LD): If one were cynical, one could
imagine a future Government sensing that there was trouble down the
track—even getting wind that you were thinking of judicial
review—and amending the Bill: “delete
‘2020’ and insert ‘2030’”, or
“delete ‘2020’ and insert ‘as soon as is
reasonably practicable’”. Does the Bill have any teeth?
You cannot bind future Governments—we know that, and this is the
nearest we can get to it. We will talk later about whether the child
poverty commission has any teeth. Is there not only a political cost,
as legal action could be forestalled? How strong is the Bill?
Kate
Bell: It is worth mentioning that all three parties
have said that they support the Bill, so I hope that it has cross-party
support and no future Government would do what you said. One of the
great things about the Bill is having the statement that all political
parties see ending child poverty by 2020 as a
priority.
Q
86Steve
Webb: But none of the parties has put anything credible in
its manifesto that would come anywhere near that. They are all paying
lip service, are they
not? Kate
Green: We look forward to your forthcoming manifestos
with great interest.
Kate
Bell: We have not yet seen your manifestos. We would
start by not being cynical about it but by saying, “This is
real.” I think it is real that any Government would have to come
back to Parliament and say explicitly, “We are no longer
committed to meeting this child poverty target”, and that is
what Kate talked about regarding the political pressure as well as the
legal one. So I think the Bill does more than just say, “This
would be done” or “This would be nice.” I think it
is a real
commitment.
Q
87Ms
Karen Buck (Regent’s Park and Kensington, North)
(Lab): As you know, the Government are introducing a new
indicator for persistent poverty, but as yet, exactly how that will be
measured is not set out in detail. What would be an effective way of
measuring sustained, persistent and deep poverty? Is there a risk that
the indicator will once again allow Governments to concentrate on
households just below the poverty level, and will not necessarily deal
with deepened and sustained poverty?
Kate
Green: I think it is unfair to say that Government
policy to date has dealt only with people just below the poverty line.
In fact, I think I am right in saying that there have been improvements
on income across all income deciles. Some policies have been
increasingly directed at those who are at greater risk of poverty,
although I think that there is more to
do. I
think the advantage of measuring persistent poverty is that that gets
to a group of families who suffer significant disadvantage.
Particularly, it gets at some of the instability that persistent
poverty causes for family incomes. That includes them moving in and out
of poverty; they are out of poverty for short periods, but there are
long periods when they are plunged back in again. I think we would be
interested in measuring, over a period of time, children who spend most
of their time below the poverty line, and I think that would be a
useful way of getting to a number of the at-risk groups that we are
concerned
about. Neera
Sharma: We can also get to the at-risk groups as part
of the strategy and the building blocks. The strategy needs to include
a focus on groups most at risk of poverty, which are set out in the
equality impact assessment. Examples include children in BME groups and
disabled children. That is another way of making sure that progress is
made with the children who are most at risk of poverty and persistent
poverty.
Q
88Ms
Buck: Are the Government right to have, to some extent,
changed the goalposts a little by moving away from a clear
after-housing-costs measurement of poverty, or does that not
matter? Kate
Bell: I think that the sector view has always been
that the after-housing-costs measure is the better one. The Government
took a decision a long time ago, in 2003, to have their headline figure
in terms of before-housing costs. Luckily, the after-housing-costs
figure continues to be measured, and that is the one we examine when
child poverty figures come out. Although we lost the battle six years
ago, we will continue to monitor that
figure.
Q
89Ms
Buck: Can you explain what the difference would be, or has
been? Neera
Sharma: The after-housing-costs measure gives a
better indication of the disposable income that families have after
housing costs. Housing costs vary so much across the country. That is
why we keep the focus on that measure. For us it is a more accurate
measure of disposable income for families and a better measure of child
poverty.
Q
90Andrew
Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): Clause 8 is the
heart of the Bill in some ways; it deals with the UK strategies that
the Secretary of State will have to put in place. There are clearly
some good and important things there. I will not read them all out, but
subsection (5) refers to the facilitation of employment, the
development of skills, the provision of financial support, health,
education and social services, housing and the natural environment.
None of us would disagree with any of those.
What other
areas that you consider important are missing from that list? I would
be interested to hear from all of you about what shape you think the UK
strategy should have. We have not done as well as we all would have
liked, notwithstanding some progress over
the past 10 years. So how will it be different? What drivers of poverty
do we need to hit rather harder to really step up the progress over the
next
decade? Kate
Bell: The important thing about these building
blocks, as they have been called, is that they give you the tools that
you might be looking at for tackling child poverty. They define quite
nicely the tools that you can use when you are looking at the strategy.
They also provide a bit of space for whichever Government is
implementing the strategy to decide what those tools might look like
and how that would work.
Certainly
Gingerbread thinks that the tools around employment will be
particularly important. We know that if we are going to end child
poverty by 2020 we need to see more parents in work, but employment is
probably going to look quite different. It will have to be much more
flexible. There will have to be many more opportunities for part-time
jobs. One thing that we will want the strategy to do is to create those
opportunities and to make sure that there are real jobs that lift
families out of
poverty. Kate
Green: We would like to echo what Kate Bell says
about the importance of the employment building block and how that is
broadly interpreted, in relation to not just employment rates, but the
quality of work and the fact that it genuinely lifts families and
children out of poverty. We see child care as an important element of
the building blocks that you need if a child poverty strategy is to be
successful. There has been good progress in creating child care places
in recent years, but clearly there is still a very long way to go
before parents will be able to access the affordable and available
child care that they want and
need. We
are also interested in placing child well-being centrally in the way
that we think about the approach to the strategies to eradicate child
poverty. I think we see the building blocks as being quite useful for
developing policies across a range of different aspects of public,
national and local provision, which would make sure that children at
the greatest risk of poverty were reached. Many of the elements that
are in the building blocks are very helpful for
that. Neera
Sharma: I would echo what Kate has said.
Barnardo’s broadly welcomes all these areas, but in drawing up
the strategy it is key that the needs of those children and families
most at risk of poverty are specifically addressed. We need to consider
how those building blocks could target those families and reach the
families that have been in persistent poverty and are hard to
reach. Fergus
Drake: From a Save the Children perspective, I
completely echo what has been said already. We had some very
interesting feedback from children when we worked with the child
participation unit to get feedback directly on what was proposed in the
Bill. They expressed concern about these four areas being seen as silos
and the fact that there needs to be a strategic focus on how they can
be joined up. I thought that was an excellent point. It is in step with
one of our overall points about giving children a voice in the Bill, in
terms of participation, particularly at ground level with local
authorities.
Q
91Andrew
Selous: May I press you all a little bit more on that, as
it is really important and gets to the heart of the Bill? Do you think
that there are any
omissions in subsection (5)? Are there any things that are not there and
make you think, “Gosh, if we are really going to make progress
we need to do something about x”?
Secondly, I
have not really heard anything from you about what extra things need to
be done, or what needs to be done differently to try to step up the
pace a bit. Sadly, we look as if we may not reach the 2010 target. We
have got to do better. We cannot have more of the same, notwithstanding
the progress made. I have not heard what I hoped to hear from those
earlier answers, and I want to press you all a bit
more. Kate
Green: I think that child care is missing. Health,
education and social services are fine, but we specifically say that
child care is so key to a successful child poverty strategy that we
would like to see it explicitly in the building blocks. On what more
should be done, or what should be done differently, a number of
interesting issues were raised on Second Reading, particularly
regarding benefits adequacy and an adequate financial safety net. That
is something that is not sufficiently in the thinking of the
anti-poverty policy to date. That is certainly something that we want
to see getting proper attention in the strategies that come forward as
a result of the legislation.
Like many of
you, all of us are very concerned about rising levels of in-work
poverty and addressing some of the disincentives built into the system,
which were highlighted in the Centre for Social Justice report the
other day, for example. A proper focus on those disincentives in the
system, but also on what is happening in the workplace regarding
quality of jobs and level of pay, is a very important part of a
holistic anti-poverty strategy that is genuinely everybody’s
business.
We are also
very interested in how other legislation may, to some degree, work
against the Bill and its intentions. For example, it is very important
that we examine welfare reform proposals for their impact on child
poverty. While there are some very good intentions in the welfare
reform proposals—from all political parties—on helping
more parents into good-quality sustainable jobs, which of course we all
support, we have to be anxious that too punitive a model of welfare
reform, or a model that rewards the wrong sort of provision, could
actually be damaging for child poverty. For example, we might see
increases in levels of benefit sanctions coming through over the next
few
years.
Q
92Ms
Sally Keeble (Northampton, North) (Lab): Fergus, I wanted
to ask you about the excellent films that you produced, in which one of
the factors that the young people identified as being a problem for
child poverty was overcrowding. Would you welcome the kind of measures
that Helen talked about this morning, where the Bill would improve the
standards for overcrowding from the pretty abysmal current
standards? Fergus
Drake: Yes. What we saw in the series of films, where
children engaged with what poverty meant for them in their own
environments, was very powerful. We heard directly on issues about free
school meals and child uniforms. Social housing, in particular, is
something that there are ongoing concerns about—its impact on
educational attainment and the social circumstances that people then
report back in school, which can then lead to areas of discrimination
there.
Q
93Ms
Keeble: What we heard this morning was that the
overcrowding standards will be improved by the Bill; I remember in the
films that overcrowding was particularly mentioned. Are you concerned
that those standards need to be properly monitored and enforced, if
they are higher than the standards that are accepted currently as
constituting statutory
overcrowding? Fergus
Drake: I think that we would welcome that,
certainly.
Ms
Keeble: Would you want to see them properly
enforced? Fergus
Drake:
Yes.
Q
94Ms
Keeble: What I was concerned about is that Kate Green has
now mentioned the problems of conflicting bits of legislation, which
there could be here. There is even a conflict between the Children and
Young Person’s Act 2008 and some immigration legislation. Are
you concerned that some of the very good measures in the Bill might be
overridden by other bits of legislation, for example on access to
housing?
Kate
Green: I think that we are. I do not have a comment
on that issue specifically, but I can think of a number of
areas where there could be conflicts between the Bill and other
legislation.
Kate
Green: Welfare reform is one. You mentioned
immigration legislation, which I think is clearly another. At any
moment, changes in world circumstances could lead to an upsurge,
potentially, of children in the UK suddenly becoming vulnerable to
poverty. I think that we are also anxious about the legislation that we
are expecting from the Government on reducing the deficit and how
public spending decisions might affect the child poverty target. It is
very important to us, therefore, that decisions about public spending
and managing the public finance deficit should address the need to
continue spending on child poverty measures to meet the requirements of
the
Bill.
| 
