Helen
Goodman: Earlier, we discussed whether we should have a
specific reference to regional development agencies in the Bill. Both
Opposition parties say that they want to close down the RDAs, which
have been an absolute engine of job creation in the regions. David
Blanchflower, the former member of the Monetary Policy Committee, said
that the unemployment rate would be 5 million higher if the
Conservative party’s plans were implemented. Opposition Members
really need to start thinking about these issues in a clearer and more
constructive manner.
Amendments 7
and 72 relate to clause 21, which sets out the requirement for local
authorities and their partners to prepare and publish a needs
assessment. That forms the basis of the joint local child poverty
strategy, which must be published under clause 22. Clause 21(2) and (3)
give the Secretary of State the power to make regulations that may
prescribe the contents of the needs assessment.
In amendment
7, hon. Members suggest that the regulations made under clause 21
should require local authorities and their partners to consider job
creation and family resilience. We heard from witnesses on 20
October about the important work that local authorities and their
partners can carry out to tackle child poverty. It is clear that
supporting and improving outcomes for families and working with local
employers on the availability of jobs in their areas and the removal of
barriers to parental employment are important elements of effective
local child poverty strategy.
Although
those elements have a vital role, we also heard that we must not set
our partners in local government an impossible task. For the purposes
of the needs
assessment, we must ensure that we do not impose undue burdens by asking
local authorities and their partners to measure issues on which they do
not have access to data and which they cannot measure. The issues as
framed and as highlighted by the hon. Member for South-West
Bedfordshire are complex, and local authorities will not be in a
position to measure them directly. I turn now
to the hon. Gentleman’s remarks on family resilience. I am glad
that he has read the report from the Children’s Society, but I
hope that he read in the appendix the acknowledgment to the person
whose idea it was to set up the inquiry into the condition of
childhood. The point about that excellent piece of work by the society
is that it looks at things from the child’s perspective and
offers a complete picture of child well-being, while the Bill is about
child poverty, and they are not the same
issue. Let
me return, however, to the issue of parenting and resilience. In 2007,
a report on parenting and resilience commissioned by the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation described family resilience as a complex concept
that refers to a family’s ability to manage in difficult
circumstances and to achieve outcomes that are better than anticipated
given the pressures that the family face. The report indicates that
resilience is difficult to measure and that approaches vary to child
resilience, parental resilience and family resilience. It is not clear
how a local authority or its partners would measure the concept as set
out in the amendment.
Again, the
hon. Gentleman takes an issue—on this occasion, family
resilience—asserts that it is important and says that it should
therefore be in the Bill. The remarks made by the hon. Member for
Northavon on that matter were eminently sensible. The problem that lone
parents face is worklessness. The hon. Gentleman might know that there
is a 55 per cent. chance that a child in a lone parent family is living
in poverty, if their parent is out of work. For a child living with a
workless couple, the chance increases to 68 per cent. I wish to draw
the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that it might not be
the family’s status but the other things going on in that
family’s life that are
significant. If
something is not in the Bill, that does not mean that it is not
important, nor that the Government are not paying attention to it. The
Department for Children, Schools and Families has a number of
programmes that support families in which there has been family
breakdown. It has £5 million for pilots dealing with support for
separated parents. Over the next two years, we are providing £7
million strategic funding to a number of third sector organisations
that work directly with families experiencing relationship conflict,
and we have provided £3 million to third sector organisations
such as Relate. We have just announced an increase in the number of
family intervention projects. All those things are going on outside the
context of the Bill, and I therefore urge the hon. Member for
South-West Bedfordshire not to confuse something that is important with
something that needs to be in the Bill. Another institution that we
have established, and which provides support to families, is Sure
Start. The Conservative party, of course, is not committed to
maintaining the level of funding for Sure Start
either. I
shall return to the draft regulations, which we have made available to
the Committee. They state that, alongside the other risk factors and
drivers of child poverty, the
needs assessment will require local authorities to consider the level of
both in and out-of-work poverty in their locality, and assess the
barriers to parental employment. The needs assessment will also set out
information about family size and structure, and require local partners
to assess the well-being of children in poverty in relation to each of
the five Every Child Matters outcomes. In that way, the needs
assessment will identify the employment and family support needs in the
local area. We will, of course, consult on the regulations before they
are
laid. My
hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North is right
to highlight in amendment 72 the importance of ensuring that
parents take up all the benefits and tax credits to which they are
entitled. Ms
Sally Keeble (Northampton, North) (Lab): Apart from being
concerned about the take-up of child tax credit, I am also extremely
concerned about the take-up of the child care element of it. That used
to be a separate tax credit—the child care tax credit—but
it is now a child care element of other tax credits. In the Treasury
Committee, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs representatives
were not able to say what that take-up was, even though there had
previously been problems with low take-up. Will my hon. Friend the
Minister say a bit more about that, and indicate whether the Government
might be able to provide some figures, if not now, at some later stage?
The ability to pay for child care is absolutely critical if parents,
particularly single parents, are to get
work.
Helen
Goodman: Both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for
Northavon have raised the take-up of tax credits, and my hon. Friend is
right that that is as important as the take-up of benefits. The latest
estimates that we have are for 2007-08, and suggest that take-up of
child tax credit is 81 per cent., rising to 92 per cent. for households
with incomes of less than £10,000. This is a phenomenally high
take-up compared with, for example, the family income supplement, which
is the benefit that was aimed at the in-work poor 20 years
ago.
Steve
Webb: I am grateful to the Minister for that figure. She
will know that take-up is measured in two ways: the proportion of the
money that is claimed and the proportion of people who claim. Could she
clarify whether her 81 per cent. or 90 per cent. numbers are
expenditure-based figures, in other words amounts of money? Does she
have the case load figures and can she explain the discrepancy between
the 60 per cent. in the household below average income figures and the
sorts of figures she is
quoting?
Helen
Goodman: I will have to write to the hon.
Gentleman— [Interruption.] I will write to
the Committee on that
point. I
want to say something about what we are doing to improve take-up in
cities, as it is important. We set up the take-up task force chaired by
Sir Trevor Chinn, which published its report in the summer. Hon.
Members will no doubt have had an opportunity to look at that. In
essence that report proposes a more joined-up approach to encouraging
take-up. One thing we are doing is piloting the placement of HMRC
advisers in Sure Start children’s centres to promote take-up and
reduce error
in tax credit claims. We are also piloting raising the childcare element
of the children’s tax credit to 100 per cent—in most
places it is 80 per cent.—to see what impact that
has. My
hon. Friend the Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North
was not here to speak to her amendment, but I wanted to address those
points because they have been raised by other hon. Members. I hope that
the Committee will agree that it is important to leave the specific
detail of the issues that the needs assessment must cover to
regulations, rather than insert them in the
Bill.
Ms
Keeble: Will my hon. Friend deal with the point about the
take-up of the child care element which the HMRC reps were not able to
answer? Or will she undertake to write to the Committee? It is a
specific element and its take-up has been heavily criticised. Nobody
quite knows why, on the most recent questioning, HMRC could not even
provide the figures. Will my hon. Friend look into that and let us
know, as it is such a key issue when it comes to tackling child
poverty?
Helen
Goodman: Of course I will be happy to look into it. If the
information is available I will supply it in the letter to the
Committee that covers the take-up
questions. In
conclusion, I hope that the Committee will agree that it is important
that the requirements in the needs assessment regulations must be
deliverable by local authorities and their partners, but that the
issues of family support and employment, including take-up of benefits
and tax credits, are already covered by the draft regulations. I hope
that the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire is reassured that I
have presented adequate draft regulations to the Committee that meet
his concerns and so will withdraw his
amendment.
Andrew
Selous: I would like to respond to a number of points made
in the debate. I should like to reassure the hon. Member for Northavon
that I recognise that low educational attainment and aspiration are
fundamental to the issue we are discussing, as is the prospect of work
in terms of men whom women may want to partner or marry. Job creation
and family resilience are closely connected from that point of view. My
proposal would work alongside those two
areas. I
am sorry that the Minister responded in a semi-hostile way. I did not
fully understand her logic. She said that there were a number of
important areas but that did not mean that they should be in the Bill.
That logic slightly escapes me. There is perhaps an argument the other
way. If something is important, then perhaps it should be in the Bill.
She mentioned a number of issues and made a number of accusations, to
which I need to respond. She talked about the new deal. The fact is
that there are many critics of the new deal in her own party. If we
examine its effectiveness—whether it has provided value for
money for the taxpayer and done the best possible job for the people
who have been through it—and if we look at the churn, it is
clear that we should have higher aspirations. As taxpayers we should be
demanding slightly more for our money. That is where our thoughts on
welfare reform are heading, and I thought that that was where the
Government were heading as well.
4.30
pm On
apprenticeships, the Minister may have missed our announcements
recently in our “Get Britain Working” programme. We are
committed to providing even more apprenticeships. We recognise that
they are important. She is also right that my party is not a fan of
regional development agencies. When I referred to them this morning, I
was careful to include any organisations that might follow them. We,
perhaps like the Liberal Democrats, want a more local form of economic
regeneration. In my own area—the east of England—we have
little in common even with the Cambridge economy, and certainly not
with East Anglia’s. There are arguments for localising the
important work of economic regeneration
more. As
for Sure Start, I am sorry that the hon. Lady repeated her accusations.
They were tried by her party in the recent Norwich, North by-election,
but the voters gave their verdict on them. She is not correct in what
she says about my party’s policy on Sure Start. We have
significant plans for children’s Sure Start centres up and down
the
country. Mr.
Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab): That statement is at distinct
odds with a recent Westminster Hall debate, when a Conservative Front
Bencher said nothing of the
sort.
Andrew
Selous: I did not quite catch what the hon. Gentleman
said, but, as my colleagues have said, we have significant plans for
the health visitor network and we want to do a number of important
things for children’s centres.
Helen
Goodman: Is not the hon. Gentleman’s party
proposing to divert possibly up to 30 per cent. of the resources
currently expended on Sure Start into the health visiting service? How
can he suggest that he can maintain the current network of Sure Starts
and take out such a large chunk of the
funding?
Andrew
Selous: There are questions as to how the budget is best
used in Sure Start centres. Ministers seem to imagine that the only way
to spend money effectively is in the way that they are spending it. The
Minister talked about Sure Start centres and I have said what I wanted
to say on that. Repeating allegations about other parties’
priorities is not
helpful. I
have listened to the debate and I will not press amendment 7 to a
Division. We have voted on similar areas already, so I cannot see that
it would add much value. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment. Amendment,
by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 21
ordered to stand part of the
Bill. Clauses
22 and 23 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clause
24Meaning
of “child poverty” in Part
2 John
Howell (Henley) (Con): I beg to move amendment
63, in clause 24,
page 14, line 7, leave out from
‘of’ to ‘section’ in line 8.
I will not
detain the Committee for long. The amendment is and always was intended
to probe an issue that was covered in some detail this morning. I wish
to illustrate the difficulties that were raised particularly by the
local government representatives at their evidence session. There is a
problem in being able to show the relevance of the target that the
amendment would delete in the local government context. We considered
that in some detail this morning in relation to Paul Carter’s
evidence and the difficulty over the 48,000 children. We discussed it
in terms of proxy targets, which covered quite a lot of the issue. It
will still be useful to give the Minister the opportunity to justify a
little more clearly than she did this morning the relevance of the
target to local government officers, who succinctly expressed the
difficulties of meeting
it.
Mr.
Gauke: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship
again, Mr. Key. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member
for Henley for bringing the Committee’s attention to this point.
In part 2, the definition of child poverty is different from the one
that applies in part 1, which includes the duties on the Government.
The definition in part 2 is slightly narrower to exclude the persistent
poverty target, but it includes the relative low income target, which
uses the figure of 60 per cent. of median income.
As we heard
from the experts in the evidence session on 20 October, that target is
one in which the key method of achievement tends to be through the tax
and benefits system. The evidence given by Richard Kemp from the Local
Government Association is helpful. He argued that local authorities
might have a role in safeguarding communities and preparing for new
industries and new opportunities. However, he said
that “there
are other areas—which might rightly be in the Bill—where
you think that you have given us a duty to do something, but I will not
be able to have any effect on it because those levers are outside my
control. That is why we concentrate on the areas where we do have
control.”——[Official Report, Child
Poverty Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2009; c. 71-72,
Q152.] As we
discussed in this morning’s debate about duties and what local
authorities can do, the 60 per cent. target—I am not suggesting
that it is not valuable or that it is not important for the
Government—poses practical difficulties for local authorities.
To put it another way, Councillor Kemp referred to the levers outside
his control. Given that the Bill sets an absolute low income target and
a combined low income and material deprivation target in clause
24—those targets apply to local authorities—what levers
do local authorities have that apply to the relative low income target,
but do not apply to the absolute low income target or the combined low
income and material deprivation targets? What does the clause 2 target
in clause 24 add to the Bill that cannot otherwise be achieved, given
what local authorities can practically do? We all recognise that local
authorities have a big role to play, but it is not clear how local
authorities, as opposed to central Government, can deliver that
target.
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