Guardian's Allowance Up-rating Order 2012

My Lords, I have a few brief points to make about the Tax Credits Up-Rating Regulations 2012. The Minister mentioned the change for couples, the 16 to 24-hour rule. Can he tell the Committee how many people are going to lose tax credits as a result of this and how this improves incentives for that group to take mini-jobs? The Minister also mentioned working tax credit and childcare costs and went on to talk about how the measures are improving incentives to work, especially for women. I am sure that he is aware of the report published today by the Daycare Trust about childcare and how the cuts in the level of childcare costs to be met by tax credits are contributing to the crisis in childcare. Growing numbers are unable to afford childcare because no affordable and accessible childcare is available. This certainly does not improve incentives for women to take paid work. On the contrary, some women are having to leave paid work because they cannot afford the childcare, particularly when this is combined with the changes that will come in with universal credit where the withdrawal rate will be worse for second earners, the great majority of whom are women. It is difficult to see how these will be a great improvement in incentives for women. I want to raise one other point. When the Minister repeated the Autumn Statement in your Lordships' House, I asked him about the decision to renege on the pledge to increase child tax credit in real terms and what impact that would have on children living in poverty. I was referred to the Treasury website. I realised why, of course, when I discovered that the impact would be to increase the number of children living in poverty by 100,000. Perhaps that was not something the Minister particularly wanted to tell the House. I then had another go with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, in Oral Questions when I asked him why the Government had dismissed the projected 100,000 increase in child poverty due to the change in tax credits—reneging on the tax credits increase—as a statistical quirk that arose from the relative nature of that poverty, even though in opposition the Prime Minister had made the loud and clear promise that, "““the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty””." The answer that I received from the noble Lord, Lord Freud, seemed to be a response to a different question. I hope that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, may now be able to give me the answer to that question, given its relevance to the tax credits uprating order.