Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

I am sorry for not notifying you in advance, Mr Deputy Speaker, that my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and I would be job sharing on Report. We had a reasonably comprehensive debate in Committee on clause 3, which deals with the abolition of the health in pregnancy grant, although not as comprehensive as we would have liked. The Minister did not provide as much explanation as we would have liked on why he and his Government colleagues felt compelled to rush into axing the grant without sufficient evidence that it is not achieving the purposes for which it was intended. Amendment 3 would therefore delete clause 3, the grant would continue and we would have more time to assess whether it improves maternal health and nutrition, and the health of the unborn child and the child once it is born, and whether it achieves the important aim of getting expectant women to access professional advice during pregnancy. I do not have time to rehearse in full the arguments in favour of such intervention during pregnancy. In Committee, we heard compelling evidence from witnesses of the health benefits for mother and child of tackling poor nutrition. We heard statistics about how many parents worry about not having enough money to feed their families and how many people on low incomes do not have enough money to provide healthy nutritional food. That can be seen in research carried out by organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on what sort of household income would be sufficient to provide a healthy diet. Witnesses also told us of the importance of the grant as a nudge towards changing behaviour—the Prime Minister has been a keen advocate of such nudges in the past. By giving the grant and, in particular, by making the payment conditional on accessing advice on nutrition during pregnancy, we have encouraged expectant mothers who perhaps were not completely au fait with nutritional issues to start thinking about them, to access advice on health during pregnancy and to start on the road towards changing their patterns of behaviour. The scheme was in place for only a couple of years, so there was nowhere near enough time to assess its impact, but we heard evidence that it could help break generational cycles of poor nutrition, poor health, birth defects or even mortality during childbirth. We heard other evidence about whether intervening earlier and paying the grant at 12 weeks rather than at 25 weeks would be a better approach, but we have not tabled amendments to that effect because we debated it extensively in Committee. I know that the Minister will probably say that there is little or no evidence that the scheme has done what it set out to do—the Government have also argued that in respect of the child trust fund and the saving gateway pilots. The simple answer to that is that the Government do not have any evidence that it does not work, because they simply have not given it time to roll out. The Conservative party element of the Government went into the general election seemingly happy that the health in pregnancy grant would continue. I concede that the Liberal Democrats are honouring their election commitment to scrap the grant and so are being consistent—they are wrong, but for once they are being consistent. I shall now deal with the more detailed amendments tabled by the Labour Front-Bench team. Amendment 42 calls for a year's moratorium on the abolition of the grant while a full review of its benefits is carried out. Such a review would consider the advantages and disadvantages of retaining it in its current form; of means-testing it or otherwise targeting it towards those who are deemed to be most in need and who would benefit the most; or of replacing it with a system of vouchers. I stress that our preferred option is retaining the grant in its current form, but throughout the Bill's progress through the House and in Committee two main criticisms have been made by the opponents of the grant. The first is that, as a universal benefit, it goes to those who do not need it and the money could be better spent on those who do. The second is that, because it is given as a direct payment with no restrictions on how it should be spent, it could be spent on frivolities. That is said despite the evidence we heard from child poverty groups, not only in this instance, but in general throughout the debate on child poverty. They suggest that the vast majority of women trying to get by on very limited incomes will spend any modest additional resources wisely and well, doing so for the benefit of their child or, as in this case, their unborn child. Some said on Second Reading that women could not be trusted, which is why we included as an option for the review consideration of whether a voucher scheme would be a better use of money. Amendment 46 also calls for a moratorium, although it does not propose a time scale, while the Treasury—assisted, I would imagine, by the Department of Health or the Department for Education—conducts a review of current provisions for expectant and new mothers. That would include looking at other options on the table; it would consider not just the health in pregnancy grant, but the way in which it overlaps and interlinks with the Healthy Start scheme and the Sure Start maternity scheme, which is also being rolled back. That would give us the opportunity to examine whether those schemes are a more effective way of achieving what the health in pregnancy grant was designed to achieve. Amendment 44 suggests postponing the abolition of the grant until 2014 and is, thus, self-explanatory. That would give more time for a proper assessment to be carried out on the experience of and health outcomes for people who have received the grant, and, more importantly, had access to the advice on maternal health which has accompanied the money. That leads me to the last of the amendments tabled by those of us on the Opposition Front Bench. Amendment 49 calls again for a one-year moratorium during which the Government will consider how we can ensure that more women have access—