Q
95Ms
Keeble: Fergus, at that event the young people also talked
very specifically about the business about holidays—something
that some people might think is marginal to child poverty, but was
clearly important to them. Are you concerned that quite a number of
those measures are tucked away in the regulations as side issues rather
than being in the Bill? How do you think we can ensure that those
issues are carried through and
enforced? Fergus
Drake: Because we have been talking about the four
points that are the building blocks, I would hope that the local
authority, in terms of needs assessments and local child poverty
strategies, would be able to focus on quite a few of those areas. In
general, those areas have a huge impact on children’s sense of
self-worth and where they stand with regard to their peers. That can
flow into their aspirations about their future. Yes, I agree with
you.
Q
96Ms
Keeble: Bearing in mind that not all local authorities are
responsible authorities—that is something else that we discussed
this morning—do you think that
a local authority, faced with a choice between repairing a pavement and
letting a poor kid go on holiday, might prioritise the pavement over
the child? That is the kind of thing that I am thinking
about.
Fergus
Drake: I think that that is one of the things that we
are very keen on, in that we are very supportive of the focus in the
Bill on local authorities, as I have said already. But we would also be
keen that resources are flowing in that direction as well, where there
is more emphasis on them to have that focus and that work. Such
choices—between the bins or child poverty—are not at the
front and centre of what people actually have to allocate resources
to.
Q
97Ms
Keeble: Do you feel that there is enough in the Bill to
look at the overlap between ethnicity and poverty among
children? Fergus
Drake: I would be interested in other views on
that. Neera
Sharma: The equality impact assessment published
alongside the Bill specifically mentions children from BME communities
and the high levels of poverty in those groups. The strategies and
building blocks should address the needs of those children, and local
authorities should also prioritise those groups as part of their
sustainable communities strategies.
Q
98Mr.
Stuart: Do you think it a mistake to exclude mental health
trusts from the list of responsible authorities and partner
authorities? They appear not to be listed in either list—neither
are acute trusts or the new health delivery bodies.
[Interruption.] If you look on page 10, you will
see that under health, you have the strategic health authority and the
primary care trust, but you do not have mental health trusts with a
specific duty, despite the fact that one would think that there is a
fairly clear link between mental ill health and
poverty. Kate
Green: Indeed there is; both parental and child
mental ill health. It is certainly not specifically
listed.
The
Chairman: Do any of our witnesses wish to respond to
that?
Kate
Bell: I do not think that it is an issue that we have
looked at.
Kate
Green: I think that that has always been our concern
about the lists. In any given list of building blocks, groups of
children or partner authorities, you are always at risk of missing
either someone who is key and has somehow been forgotten or someone who
becomes key, though who is not envisaged so today.
Between now
and 2020 there could suddenly be a very live issue or an agency that
needs to be engaged in making the strategy work. That is why we are
interested in having the strategies at the heart of the way we make
this legislation live. Though we had not given it thought or
particularly picked up the Mental Health Trust’s important
point, we know that mental ill health is associated with high levels of
child poverty. Parental mental ill health significantly locks parents
out of the labour market, for example, or propels them into poor
quality stop-go jobs. We are also aware in terms of wider child
well-being of the pressures on child and adolescent mental health
services. You rightly draw attention to that important group of
organisations in terms of improving children’s enjoyment and
health.
The
Chairman: Andrew, do you have a question on the list
itself?
Q
99Andrew
Selous: Yes. Briefly, I would like to press a bit
further on that general point. In the list of partner authorities in
clause 19 you see police authorities and chief officers of police but
not further education colleges or chambers of commerce, for example.
The list is slightly odd to me. I wonder whether any of your eyebrows
have been raised at some of the partner authorities included and
whether there were any that you thought should be
included. Kate
Bell: The explanatory notes explain that employment
partnerships are covered under the duty of the Secretary of State. With
the structure of further education changing so that it is devolved down
to local authority level, we hope that they will come under the local
authority remit. The other useful thing about the strategies, both at
local and national level, is the duty to consult. I hope that if there
are omissions they are being picked up as we go through. Again, that
may be an optimistic
view.
The
Chairman: It seems to me that the list is an interesting
area. Maybe our witnesses would wish to send in a supplementary
memorandum when they have had time to think about it.
Minister, you
have been very
patient.
Q
100Helen
Goodman: This is a question for all of you but I think
Kate Bell might have some particular insights. Do you think that family
breakdown is a major driver of child poverty? Should it have been added
to the list of building blocks in clause 8? Are there obvious policies
that could be introduced to reduce family breakdown and have a major
impact on child poverty in this
country? Kate
Bell: What I was trying to say earlier about the
building blocks is very important. They are tools and not target
groups. We would understandably be very concerned about a specific
strategy that set out to prevent family breakdown as a causal approach
to tackling child poverty. We know that children growing up in
single-parent families in this country are more likely to be poor, but
we also know that some of the countries that do best on child poverty
have very similar levels of single parenthood to this
country.
There would
be concern if tackling family breakdown were applied at individual
family level. We know that outcomes on a global level are better for
children in two-parent families although, again, the causal links are
very unclear. There are families where it is much better if the parents
do split up. The outcomes for children actually improve in that
situation. A global target to reduce family breakdown may impact poorly
on
that. Kate
Green: Clearly, nobody would want to stop investment
in supporting family and couple relationships, but we doubt that that
would be an assured instrument for ultimately eradicating child
poverty. As Kate Bell says, other countries with high levels of single
parenthood are able to have much lower levels of child poverty than we
have. No direct link can be traced in a range of developed countries
between the level of single parenthood and children’s well-being
and outcomes. We published
some research on that as an update of the UNICEF report card, which did
ask that question. As Kate says, it is a matter of disentangling causes
and consequences. There is no doubt that lone-parent households are at
high risk of poverty, but that can be addressed successfully.
Nevertheless, we should be doing all we can to protect couple and
family relationships wherever
possible.
Q
101Mr.
Gauke: Kate Green, I would like to follow up
quickly your comments on concerns about the proposed fiscal
responsibility Bill and welfare reform. Coming back to my earlier
question, given the duties on the Secretary of State under clause 1,
are there areas here where there may be scope for taking the Government
to judicial review because they fail to abide by those duties in
pursuit of other policies, such as welfare reform
ones? Kate
Green: I do not think that the Child Poverty Action
Group is quite as trigger-happy with judicial review as you might be
suggesting. Apart from anything else, it is
expensive.
Mr.
Gauke: You have had your
successes. Kate
Green: We have had some successes. To some degree, we
want to see this legislation produce moral pressure and moral will to
create a space in which all politicians of all parties vie to achieve,
rather than look for ways to duck and evade the intentions of the
legislation. I
cannot remember which country they were from—probably one of the
Nordic ones, as usual—but we had some visitors who, very
interestingly, were talking about localising their child poverty
strategies, the impact of regional government and devolution, and
whether that had fragmented the anti-poverty strategy. They said that,
on the contrary, it had led to competition between the different local
agencies to drive their child poverty standards up. So we are hopeful
that this legislation will raise the game, rather than lead us to look
for ways to say, “Well, that bit of legislation over there means
that you are not really serious about achieving these targets”.
Having said that, we do not rule out using legal means to challenge
legislation if that seems necessary, and where we see clear
discrepancies or something working directly against the Bill’s
intentions.
Q
102Julie
Morgan (Cardiff, North) (Lab): You have all raised the
importance of child care, and it is obviously the key to employment for
many people. It has to be affordable and accessible. How could that be
put into legislation? Do you think it should
be? Kate
Green: Local authorities are already required to
undertake child care sufficiency assessments, and they give us some
very important data now about the nature of child care provision and
where the gaps exist. Clearly, what we want is not just to have the
data, but to have action on those assessments. That is a moving picture
for local authorities: it is possible to deal with pockets of need and
demand today, and then find that a new set of needs and demands pop up
tomorrow because employment patterns or demographics in the local
authority change. Certainly, some of the changes in migration patterns
into the inner-London boroughs can very quickly cause a stretch on
child care and on school places too. It is very important that we take
the child care sufficiency assessments as the base point for doing
something with that knowledge. Child Poverty Action Group would like
to see child care included in the building blocks, because then we would
get clear certainty that there would be plans to address it within the
child poverty
strategies. I
should also say that I am talking about England. There is of course an
issue for the devolved nations, and I know that colleagues from
Scotland would certainly express some different concerns. I am not
really in a position to say very much about that, but I do know that
that is an area that the Committee may want to
investigate.
Q
103Helen
Goodman: Of course what you say about child care being
central to children’s well-being and vital for parents’
employment opportunities is absolutely true, but do you not feel that
the duties that were put on to local authorities, with respect to
provision, information and introducing child care in a way designed to
increase equality in local areas, have already covered that point? If
we were to incorporate it into the Bill, would that not be an
unnecessary
duplication? Kate
Green: No; I think it would be a reinforcement of the
good progress that has been made so far to recognise the absolute
importance of child care. I suppose that the other thing that will be
important about having it in the context of the Bill is that it will be
a very child-centred Bill, which is important for us in terms of
thinking about what child care is for and what good child care looks
like. I hope it would not mean that it created extra effort and
difficulty in people’s minds. I think that there is a real local
understanding of the importance of the provision of good quality child
care, but I cannot see why there would be any specific disadvantage to
including it in the building blocks of this
Bill.
Q
104John
Howell (Henley) (Con): Earlier, you described the work
that you do, which we are all aware of, at a strategic level with
central Government. However, what the Bill does is to pass a lot of the
responsibility for delivery over to local government. How do you see
your role and your working relationships with local government in
practice as a result of the
Bill? Neera
Sharma: Barnardo’s works throughout the UK. We
have 400 projects working in the most disadvantaged communities and we
work in partnership with local authorities. We see the Bill giving us a
framework to work on child poverty issues. Child poverty is an
inescapable fact of all our services. Many local authorities work with
us proactively on examining issues of disadvantage and child poverty.
Some are not so engaged. So we feel that, at a local level, the Bill
will give us a framework to work with our partners.
Kate
Bell: Gingerbread, as well as lobbying and
campaigning, runs services and among the services that we run are
employment services, helping single parents to return to work. Some
local authorities have taken a very active approach on that issue. For
example, we have worked closely with Manchester city council and Camden
council. We hope that the Bill will drive that type of action and make
local authorities more open to thinking about the opportunities for
disadvantaged people in their area and how they can help them,
including helping them to move closer to the labour
market.
Q
105John
Howell: What on the ground do you see yourselves
doing differently or additionally after this Bill has received Royal
Assent that you do not already do?
Neera
Sharma: In terms of our commissioning arrangements,
we want to look at how we commission and what sort of targets we
include when we are commissioning with local authorities on child
poverty indicators. Some local authorities, when they renewed their
contracts with us recently, have asked us what our shared objectives
should be around child poverty, and others have not. So we hope to
review our commissioning arrangements with local authorities, to ensure
that we can work proactively on the child poverty agenda at a local
level.
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