The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chairmen: Mr. Martin Caton, † Robert Key

† Baron, Mr. John (Billericay) (Con)

† Barrett, John (Edinburgh, West) (LD)

† Blackman, Liz (Erewash) (Lab)

† Buck, Ms Karen (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab)

† Gauke, Mr. David (South-West Hertfordshire) (Con)

† Goodman, Helen (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions)

† Howell, John (Henley) (Con)

† Keeble, Ms Sally (Northampton, North) (Lab)

† Mallaber, Judy (Amber Valley) (Lab)

Morgan, Julie (Cardiff, North) (Lab)

† Mudie, Mr. George (Leeds, East) (Lab)

† Reed, Mr. Jamie (Copeland) (Lab)

† Selous, Andrew (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con)

† Stuart, Mr. Graham (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)

† Timms, Mr. Stephen (Financial Secretary to the Treasury)

† Webb, Steve (Northavon) (LD)

Chris Stanton, Gosia McBride, Sarah Davies, Committee Clerks

† attended the Committee

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Public Bill Committee

Tuesday 3 November 2009

(Afternoon)

[Robert Key in the Chair]

Child Poverty Bill

Clause 21

Local child poverty needs assessment

Amendment moved (this day): 7, in clause 21, page 12, line 26, after ‘assessment’, insert

‘including an assessment of—

(i) job creation, and

(ii) family resilience’.—(Andrew Selous.)

4 pm

The Chairman: I remind the Committee that with this we are considering amendment 72, in clause 21, page 12, line 26, at end insert

‘including the levels of benefit and tax credit take up among the eligible populations’.

Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): Good afternoon, Mr. Key. May I be the first to welcome you to the last sitting on the last day of our deliberations on this very important Bill? It is good to have you back with us.

Before lunch, I had been speaking to the first part of amendment 7 about the central importance of job creation being at the heart of local authorities’ quest to eradicate child poverty in their area, and I now want to move on to the second part of the amendment, which deals with family resilience.

You will be relieved to hear, Mr. Key, that I do not intend to go over the ground that I covered when we discussed family matters on a prior amendment, but I would like to add a bit of new material to support why I think that proposed new sub-paragraph (ii) in amendment 7 could usefully come into clause 21. I shall start, if I may, by quoting from a document that I have been sent by Relate, which I believe may be one of the organisations to which the Financial Secretary referred when he said that the Government give

“£7 million to third-sector organisations that work with such families”.——[Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 29 October 2009; c. 242.]

I have a strong suspicion that Relate may be one of them.

Relate states, perhaps unsurprisingly from its point of view:

“Relationship breakdown is a key cause of child poverty. Local Authorities cannot tackle child poverty without tackling relationship breakdown.”

It goes on to make several points on the same theme. It states:

“Preventing relationship breakdown wherever possible, and facilitating responsible post-separation parenting increases the likelihood that households will have at least one salary coming in”,

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and, as we have said many times in this Committee, work is the best route out of poverty, so it is obviously important. Relate also discusses the

“large number of non-resident parents contributing neither income nor care”

as far as their children are concerned.

When we talk about relationships, it is important to remember that post-separation, relationships can be better or worse for the children. If they are better, they can have a positive impact on income and dealing with child poverty. Relate goes on to make several suggestions about where work on that area could be done. It talks about children’s centres, work with primary care trusts and referrals from general practitioners.

The hon. Member for Northavon was correct when he said in our discussions last week that he believed that I was involved with such organisations in my constituency. In fact, last Thursday evening, I went from our second sitting to meet the director of children’s services for my local authority, so that I could introduce her to a voluntary group in my constituency that is hoping to work in that area with the local authority.

I have done some research on the background of the Ministers, and I believe that I am right in saying that the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, worked for the Children’s Society in a prior life. I am sure that she has avidly read the excellent publication, “A Good Childhood”, which was brought out by the society. She will have noted, as I have, at the top of page 22, the fact that children rate more highly than their parents do the importance of good relationships in a family and trying to avoid family breakdown. We know that, from a child’s perspective, that is incredibly important.

The last organisation that I would like to pray in aid when talking about the second part of amendment 7 is an excellent one: the Bristol Community Family Trust, which is not far from the constituency of the hon. Member for Northavon. It manages to reach one in three new mothers in Bristol—well over 900 mothers a year—and mothers and fathers, with its relationship course, “Let’s Stick Together”. All that is done in a non-stigmatising, non-moralising way. It is not about hitting anyone over the head; it is not about telling people that they do not have perfect lifestyles or relationships. As I said last week, it is all about giving people the skills and support to make a success of their lives. I agree with Relate that it can have a critical impact on child poverty.

The other amendment in the group—not in my name but that of the hon. Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North—is amendment 72, which adds to the clause consideration of

“the levels of benefit and tax credit take up among the eligible populations”.

That is an important point. The facts show that if every benefit and tax credit to which families of children living in poverty are entitled were taken up, at a stroke 400,000 would be taken out of poverty; that is a significant figure. That would obviously help the Government and all of us to move a long way towards reaching the child poverty targets. The hon. Lady is on to something. The Government run take-up campaigns across the benefit system for all groups, and they would clearly have a

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significant impact on the issue that we are considering. For that reason, I generally support the hon. Lady’s amendment.

Steve Webb (Northavon) (LD): Good afternoon, Mr. Key. I would like to say a brief word about amendment 72 and then come back to amendment 7. Amendment 72 highlights the importance of take-up. It is vital that where the state has identified a level of income to which families with children are entitled, they receive that entitlement. The key method of supporting low-income families with children—those with whom we are most concerned in the Bill—is the child tax credit, so I was surprised to see in the households below average income statistics the figures for families with children and their receipt of child tax credits. Table 4.4 shows that of all 12.8 million children in the country, only 60 per cent. are in families receiving child tax credit. That suggests that take-up might be a significant issue. While it is true that child tax credit does not apply to the entire income scale—it cuts off at about £58,000—that fact knocks out only about the richest 10 per cent. or so of families with dependent children.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Helen Goodman): I am sorry to intervene, but could the hon. Gentleman say that again, please?

Steve Webb: The whole thing? I was quoting a figure from table 4.4 of the households below average income report, page 65. It categorises children according to the benefits that their parents receive. It says that of the 12.8 million children in Britain, 60 per cent. are in families receiving child tax credit. I would assume that if every entitled family received the tax credit, the figure would be about 90 per cent. We know that there is a slight lack of take-up by case load in particular, which one might have thought would result in a figure of 80, 78, or 75 per cent., or whatever. I was startled when I looked at the figures to see 60 per cent., because that implies that around a third of families who are entitled to child tax credit are not getting it. That is a higher number than I have seen before. I am starting with this point to give the Minister time to reflect on it. Why are up to a third of those entitled to child tax credit not getting it? Amendment 72 flags up the importance of take-up and, if I understand that figure correctly, there is an important gap in the system.

To come back to amendment 7 and what should be included in the regulations on the local child poverty needs assessment, my feeling on the point about job creation is that it is almost impossible to imagine a local child poverty needs assessment that did not take account of the need for jobs. It is inconceivable that one could have such an assessment and strategy that did not take jobs into account, so sub-paragraph (i) of amendment 7 is perhaps unnecessary.

I want to say a word, however, about family resilience. In our earlier debates, the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire would perhaps have felt that those of us on the Committee who took a different perspective from him were simply refusing to accept something that was blindingly obvious and which was staring us in the face. Given that he might anticipate being on the other side of the Committee as a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions in six months’ time, it is worth probing his reasoning a little further.

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The hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out that children of lone parents are twice as likely—that is how it looks from the figures, but they are certainly significantly more likely—to be in poverty than children in two-parent families. From that, he infers the need for amendment 7, which would include family resilience in the Bill, but I want to give him one example of why we might reach the wrong policy conclusion if we approach the issue in that way.

Let us suppose that young women with low educational attainment and low aspirations are more likely to have children young and outside a stable couple relationship, which means that they are then more likely to become lone parents and to be in poverty. They are likely to be in poverty partly because their low educational attainment will mean that any job that they get might not be very good and might be low paid, and if they have young children, they will, of course, be in poverty anyway. The problem, as it were, is the low educational attainment, not lone parenthood per se, although that clearly makes life more difficult. The policy response to such young women is not couple therapy or Relate, but education, although perhaps the response would involve parenting classes for those women’s parents and all sorts of other things.

That is just one example, and I will not labour the point, because we need to make progress. What I am trying to say to the hon. Gentleman—I want to call him my hon. Friend because I think that he is sincere in what he is saying—is that just because someone in one group is more likely to be poor than someone in another group, we should not think that the title of that group tells us everything that we need to know about them. Clearly, we want to keep stable couples and parents together and we want to help people make healthy relationships, but if our goal is to tackle child poverty, we have to see the big picture—why do people become lone parents?

The other thing that we need to remember is that lone parenthood is not principally about married couples splitting up, because most lone parents have never been married. We have a whole set of policy responses for young women who are lone parents and who have never been married, and we have a set of responses for divorced people, people who have had casual relationships and ex-cohabitees. Lone parenthood is linked with poverty, but talking just about family resilience makes it sound as though family resilience is the key to unlocking everything. However, lone parenthood has diverse causes, and there are diverse policy responses. Supporting couple relationships is a good thing to do, but it is perhaps a smaller part of the overall picture than the hon. Gentleman’s simple statistical correlation might lead him to conclude. That is all that I want to communicate.

Both the issues in the amendment are important, but I am not sure that they need spelling out in the Bill. I would, however, be interested to hear about take-up, because the shortfall on child tax credit is apparently rather large, so it should be a focus for action by local authorities.

Helen Goodman: May I begin by saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr. Key?

I want to begin this mini-debate on amendments 7 and 72 by saying something about the importance of job creation. To be honest, I find it totally astonishing

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to be on the receiving end of the implied criticism that the Government have not paid sufficient attention to job creation in their range of policies. Job creation does not appear as one of the factors in the clause because the provisions are about how, not what.

I draw the attention of the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire to the vast amount of work being done on job creation. First, for example, we have the working neighbourhoods fund, which was introduced in April 2008 and which consists of a £1.5 billion three-year settlement. It is distributed to the 61 local authorities with the worst concentrations of worklessness, but the Conservative party opposes it.

4.15 pm

Then, there is the new future jobs fund, which is worth £1 billion. It aims to create 150,000 new jobs. Again, the Conservative party opposes it. Then, there are apprenticeships. We have provided an £11 million package to create 3,000 new apprenticeship opportunities. Again, the Conservative party opposes it. The Conservative party has opposed the flexible new deal, local employment partnerships, which are helping 250,000 people into work, and routes to work, which will help 50,000 long-term unemployed young people to access existing jobs.

Mr. Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con): I do not want to pre-empt anything that anyone else might say, but I wonder whether the Minister might get back to the amendment.

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Prepared 4 November 2009