Ms
Buck: Will the hon. Gentleman give
way?
Andrew
Selous: If the hon. Lady will let me finish, I will give
way to her. The report states that
“the UK has some
of the lowest levels of child well-being when compared with countries
of similar economic
wealth,” and
says: “Our
16-24-year-olds, for example, record the lowest levels of trust and
belonging in
Europe.” It
is therefore not only the Opposition making the points that I have
outlined. The Action for Children and New Economics Foundation report
is very
serious.
Ms
Buck: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that part of the
strength of the report’s analysis, with which I agree, has its
roots in decades of under-investment in child care and effective
welfare-to-work strategies, and in policies that led to a trebling of
child poverty during the 1980s? It is not possible to take the report
as a snapshot and argue that all those factors and decades of
under-investment did not play an important
part.
Andrew
Selous: I am not here to play a blame-allocation game. My
purpose is to try to get the policy right for the future. Edna Speed,
who travelled from the north-west to attend an evidence sitting, said
that she hoped that she had not made a wasted journey and that the
Committee would do the serious work to get the policy right for the
future. There has been a tendency across Governments of both parties
for far too long to use sticking-plasters as solutions and to send out
ambulances without doing some of the long-term, tough—it is not
easy—deep, preventive work that is necessary to deal with
families in the constituency of the hon. Member for Regent’s
Park and Kensington, North, as well as with families in my constituency
and, in some cases, whole communities that have suffered severe
inter-generational poverty. We are talking about long-term, deep,
serious work, not quick headlines, and it is needed alongside the
targets in clauses 2 to
5.
Steve
Webb: Good morning, Mr. Key. The amendment and
new clause are well-meaning, because they address things that we want
to do something about. The question is whether they should have
statutory force and be included in the Bill. I do not doubt for a
moment the sincerity of the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire,
but I do not think that he addressed my earlier intervention. I suspect
that every Government Minister throughout history has said that, in
general, micro-management and target-setting are a bad thing, but that
their targets are good targets. The hon. Gentleman gave a slight sense
of that by suggesting that he would strip away bad targets and have
lots of new, good ones.
New clause 3
itself indicates that its list of eight targets is not exhaustive. For
example, the list includes children growing up
“in homes with
drug and alcohol addiction”,
but not those in homes
where an adult or child has a mental health problem. One might subset
and say, “Okay, we will put that one in.” Then one might
ask about the children whose parents experience racial discrimination
in employment and as a result are less likely to get jobs and more
likely to live in poverty, and say, “We will put that on the
list.” Suddenly there is a much less focused debate. Does one
say, “Well, 100 targets would be ridiculous, so we will have the
big 10”?
Then there is distortion, as the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness
suggested, because some things are on the target list and some are
not. The point
about the Bill is that it focuses on a narrow range of goals—on
different measures of material deprivation, such as income poverty,
persistent poverty and so on. The risk is of losing focus. My view, as
I will explain later, is that four targets are too many. One of my
worries about having four targets plus the eight in the new clause, or
whatever the number, is that there would then be 12 targets, and the
Government of the day could say, “We haven’t done too
badly; we got seven out of 12.” We want to focus on one specific
goal for which the Government are held to account. One worry about the
absolute poverty target is that it is a sitter. It is a penalty with
the goalkeeper having gone off. The Government will hit that one, so
that is one out of four already. A future Government might say,
“Well, two out of four ain’t bad.” As soon as we
do that, there is a danger that we dilute what we are trying to
achieve. We want to do something about all the things on the list for
their own sake, and possibly as a means to the end of tackling child
poverty, but the Bill is about tackling child poverty in a particular
way and we risk losing focus. I hope that we will get the chance to
have a short stand part debate on clause 1, so I will not go any
broader than the subject of the amendment and the new
clause.
The
only other danger that I would highlight is that various other parts of
Government will rightly try to tackle the issues. I am concerned that
we would let the Government off the hook if we diluted the targets. We
risk having a massive debate about what is in the Bill, and what is
not. Presumably, the list in new clause 3 is not fixed in time, either.
In other words, whereas we have a 10-year target of tackling child
poverty on an income measure, things would come on to the list and go
off it as society changes. We will still be bothered about income
poverty in 10 years’ time, but some of the issues in the list
might become less prevalent, and others more prevalent, as time goes
by. Do we want to be constantly updating and changing? Or do we end up
with a list of out-of-date targets, because although there is a whole
set of bigger issues that should be on it, it is too late to change
primary legislation?
Mr.
David Gauke (South-West Hertfordshire) (Con): New clause 3
is drafted to allow the capability to amend and update. The list is not
exclusive. Indeed, the eight targets listed are not compulsory; they
are targets that may be included. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point
about the need to focus on different issues at different times, because
some matters may be addressed and others may emerge, but the amendment
allows that flexibility.
Steve
Webb: It does, but the question is: where would we start?
Would we start with a list that is broadly the length of that in the
new clause? I do not know what is in the hon. Gentleman’s mind.
That would worry me. Four plus eight makes 12 targets. Do we let the
Government off the hook if they hit seven, eight or nine? Do we count
ourselves as quibbling if they miss only two, but they are the two big
ones? Or do we have endless debates about what should be on or off the
list, or what is now more important than it used to be? I am worried
about the loss of focus. The Bill has one specific purpose.
All of the matters listed are both a means to achieving that end and
worth while in their own right. I am not sure what value is added by
picking a subset of them—or others—and statutorily
targeting them in a child poverty Bill, rather than focusing on one
specific goal for which we want to hold the Government to
account.
Mr.
Stuart: The hon. Gentleman said that the Bill is extremely
focused. It is focused on the incomes of families in which children
live. The question is whether that policy could lead to bad outcomes.
Will it lead to the allocation of resources to fulfil precisely that
aim? Perhaps, as I think he said, the Government of the day would say
they had tackled child poverty effectively by maintaining people
instead of helping them into work, altering their housing circumstances
and ensuring that they got better schooling. If they just stick the
benefits level up high enough to ensure a statistical, theoretical
removal from poverty, that will leave people stuck there. That concern
is at the heart of the amendment.
Steve
Webb: With respect, that point is at the heart of the hon.
Gentleman’s concerns, but it is the opposite to what is at the
heart of the amendment and the new clause. The amendment and new clause
would do a lot more of the kind of stuff that he mentions, because they
would add more targets. I take his point that the focus in the Bill is
too narrow. My view is that there is a risk of downplaying income
poverty. In her evidence Edna Speed described it not as absolute
poverty but as abject poverty. What is good about the measures in the
Bill is that they are not just about a line on a graph showing
equivalent household income: we have measures on persistent poverty and
material deprivation.
The
list in the “households below average income” statistics
of what counts as material deprivation is not just about lines on a
graph. It covers whether a child can go on holiday, have a new pair of
shoes, and have a hobby. It is already a broader concept than the hon.
Gentleman perhaps suggests. I risk repeating myself, but my key concern
is about whether this focused Bill could be even more focused. The
amendment risks diluting it, albeit in a well-meaning way. The matters
listed should be ends in themselves, and will form part of any child
poverty strategy anyway. I am not sure that we gain focus by adding
them to the
Bill.
Judy
Mallaber: I agree that the amendment and the new clause
would create a much less focused Bill. Some of the items in the new
clause are slightly curious. For example, it asks for
“regulations
setting out the causes of poverty
targets”, and
one of those causes is “serious personal debt”. Surely it
is the fact that a person is poor that causes them to have serious
personal debt, rather than the other way
round.
Andrew
Selous: Obviously, I recognise that there is some
truth in what the hon. Lady says, but I have spent quite a lot of time
recently with various debt counselling organisations across the country
that help families who are in poverty and have very serious debt, and
there is a particular characteristic of serious personal debt that
aggravates poverty and can keep people in poverty in a particularly
unattractive way. There is a separate facet of the debate relating to
debt.
Judy
Mallaber: The hon. Gentleman’s comments show the
complexity and the difficulty of adding extra targets in the way that
the new clause does. I could give another 40 targets, but if I did, I
would be accused of being target-mad. We all know that we have moved
between having too many targets and having too few. As my hon. Friend
the Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North, pointed out,
the danger is that by focusing solely on those at the bottom of the
pile with multiple deprivation, we ignore 2 million—perhaps even
more—of the 2.9 million people in poverty. The Bill
attempts to focus us on the broader sweep of those in
poverty.
Ms
Buck: Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a danger of
us almost psychologically profiling the poor? That is something that I
have heard Opposition Members almost do, and that issue is coming
through very strongly again this morning. Is it not true that people
who are on low incomes have as wide a range of characteristics as
people who are on medium and high incomes? Is it not true that they are
no more than just as likely to have the flaws of drinking too much
alcohol, taking drugs or being in debt, but do not have the income to
give them resilience? That is a separate but equally serious problem in
the approach taken on poverty by Opposition
Members.
Judy
Mallaber: I agree. In the questioning session I
specifically referred to many of my constituents who, if given
additional income, do not have those other problems and are perfectly
able to cope with their lives. Their sole problem is a lack of income.
That in no way denigrates the really serious problem faced by a certain
proportion of our population, and nobody downplays the importance of
any of the items in the new clause.
When I
quizzed the witnesses, there were contradictions in their answers. When
I asked about targets, Neil O’Brien
said: “I
think that you want a broader range of targets and you do not want to
privilege a few of them over others. So you want, in a sense, to be
neutral between the different types of approaches to challenging child
poverty”. He
had asked for targets, but he also said that he did not want to
privilege a few of them. If we list some of them in regulations in the
detailed way that is proposed, that is precisely what we will do.
Donald Hirsch
said: “the
key thing is to...create a commission with some clout and some
teeth, and one that provides a sort of discipline...The risk of
having lots and lots of targets is that they duplicate targets
elsewhere and also that each one of those targets itself becomes a
potentially distorting measure.”—[Official Report,
Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 116-17,
Q34-35.] 11
am The
amendment does not take account of the Bill’s structure, which
is a good structure, and we need to take equal account of the
provisions in clauses 1 and 8. Clause 8 specifically asks for a
strategy that is not just about the four income targets but about
ensuring that children do not experience socio-economic disadvantage.
That clause sets out the broad headings, such as education, financial
support, social services and employment, under which a number of those
targets would be set. We cannot have a Bill that encourages a Secretary
of State to set out a whole load of targets that might conflict with
what Ministers are doing in relation to their own departmental
interests. That would be confusing. While
nobody denies that the items in subsection (2)(a) to (h) of proposed new
clause 3 are important, they would end up creating a muddle. I am
surprised that a party that has gone on at the Labour Government for
having too many targets now seeks to introduce a whole load of new
ones. That is a slightly surprising contradiction in its position. The
amendment does not add to the Bill, and we should oppose
it. John
Howell: One of the difficulties that I have with the
Bill—I will, no doubt, wish to return to the subject later in
our deliberations—is the disjuncture that there seems to be
between the theory and the high-level aspects of the Bill on the one
hand, and its implementation on the other, particularly with regard to
how it hands over implementation to local government. I make no apology
for bringing the issue back to local government, because that is a way
of delivering the Bill. I would like there to be much more
acknowledgment of the fact that delivery of what the Bill and all of us
seek to achieve will happen only if there is a true partnership between
central and local government, and that starts at the top, with the
targets. I have listened carefully to the comments that have been made,
some of which have been surprising. The hon. Member for Northavon
questioned the desirability of updating the targets, and also
questioned how we would deal with a whole range of them. I have to tell
him that that is how the Government have imposed the mechanism of
governance on local government activities across the board. They are
always updating targets—until recently a huge number—and
are extremely adept at putting them into baskets of targets that they
can manage, monitor and change
dynamically.
Steve
Webb: Does the hon. Gentleman think that that is a happy
precedent?
John
Howell: To be fair, there are pros and cons. The cons are
that if the process gets too onerous, it creates more of a bureaucratic
structure for the management of the operation, but on the other hand it
provides flexibility to react to situations and, particularly on a
basket basis, the ability to keep the majority of the targets that one
wants and alter those on the periphery. My experience is that there are
pros and cons, and I want to return to that issue in a
second. There
is already a bit of schizophrenia—if I may use that
expression—on the Government’s part as to whether the
targets should go broader than the four income targets. I thought that
during the evidence sessions there was some recognition, however
grudging, by Ministers that the targets needed to be broader. To a
certain extent, the reference to material deprivation in the second of
those targets is an indication that Government thinking has needed to
acknowledge the broader base. The problem with the material deprivation
aspect is that it maintains the issue of addressing symptom rather than
cause, and we heard in the evidence sessions that the material
deprivation target itself did not achieve the wider range of
measurements that was needed to take into account the causes of
poverty. I refer to the question to which Neil O’Brien
replied: “The
bad thing in the Bill...is the narrowness of the legally binding
targets...That...drives you relentlessly towards downstream
intervention to give people income, rather than upstream intervention
to tackle the causes.”
That is also picked up
in Mike Brewer’s answer to another question, in which he
wished “that
there were a broader range of indicators and perhaps some that related
directly to children’s
well-being”.——[Official Report, Child
Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 101-04,
Q199-203.] Although
there were different opinions from some of the witnesses, I got the
impression that there was consensus from those whom we saw that there
needed to be broader
recognition. Let
me return to the local government point from two additional aspects.
First, as I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for
South-West Bedfordshire, local government ought to tackle child poverty
with regard to the sort of issues that are outlined in the new clause.
If we are to have that partnership, there needs to be a recognition, up
front, that that is how they are tackling it, rather than on an income
basis alone. In many ways that argument has been played out in many of
our councils across the country in the run-up to setting their own
targets. The issue comes back to the fact that some councils have
chosen to adopt the overarching indicator 116 and some have chosen to
adopt other
indicators. The
argument, philosophically, is exactly the same. For those that chose
not to opt for the overarching indicators, the argument was that they
needed a broader set of indicators, which were more based on the
outcomes that they wanted to achieve in that particular locale. There
is strong evidence for trying, right at the beginning, to set the tone
for a much broader partnership in order to achieve what we want to
achieve in the
Bill.
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