My Lords, I apologise that I was not able to speak at Second Reading. Had I done so, I would have focused in particular on the measurement of child poverty. I passionately believe that any Government who are concerned about this issue need to know what its extent is, and whether it is going up or down. Therefore, why on earth abandon the long-established measurements that have been adopted, not only in this country but by many other bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank? It is an internationally recognised approach to the measurement of poverty. I support the amendments in this group and very much support the arguments made by my noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and those of the other two speakers who have already contributed.
I begin by asking the Minister why the Government have wilfully ignored the responses to the consultation launched by the coalition Government, of which the Conservative Party was the leading partner. I want to quote from a Child Poverty Action Group document which sets out the responses to that consultation—I think that they became public as a result of a freedom of information request. Some 97% of respondents believed that all the targets under the Child Poverty Act 2010 ought to be retained. Only 8% of respondents believed that new measures were needed to replace the current ones. Some 90% of respondents believed that income should be included in a measure of poverty, and only 1% believed that it should not be included.
Some 97% of respondents believed that income is an important or very important dimension of poverty. In responses to a consultation document, you rarely get such enormously high proportions wishing to continue with something whose abolition the Government are consulting on, so I would like the Minister to say why the Government have ignored those responses. As I said earlier, the measures are based on very extensive work, and the Royal Statistical Society has always described them as the product of very valid social science procedures. I have already stressed their international aspect and their comparability with what is happening in other countries. That is my first question to the Minister.
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Having read what was said in the debate on Monday night, when my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton made the case for retaining the measures, I feel that the Minister’s reply—I hope that he will not mind my saying this—was somewhat inadequate. Perhaps he could give us a rather better answer to the one that he gave on Monday evening. The Government seem to be resting their case on their wish to measure what they call “life chances” and the need to tackle the causes of poverty. As a former academic who has been interested in social policy and worked in the area of social policy for many years, particularly in the area of educational disadvantage, I think that the Government have got themselves into a real intellectual mess here, because they cannot distinguish properly between cause and effect. I do not know where their advice is coming from and which social scientists they are seeking views from, but anybody that I have ever talked to would make it absolutely clear that many of the things that the Government now wish to measure are the effect, and not the cause, of income poverty.
I do not dispute that it is worth measuring these other things in relation to life chances. Most of them area already being measured, so the Government do not have to spend a huge amount of money collecting new information, but they cannot, and should not be, an alternative to retaining the Child Poverty Act 2010 measures. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said just now, is it not rather bizarre that something retained in legislation so recently should suddenly be abandoned? I find that very difficult to understand.
I underline that poverty is the cause of many of these serious problems. Let us look at them in turn. I am the first to accept that we should tackle worklessness. There is nothing more difficult than living in a family where no one is in work. Long-term worklessness or unemployment is a scourge in our society, and of course unemployment is one of the keys to low income. However, as my noble friend Lady Lister has already said, there are many, many families where both parents are working but the children are still living in poverty. Indeed, 64% of children living in poverty are in fact in working families. Surely we must come back to that statistic. Indeed, employment does not always alleviate poverty, so please will the Government look at the evidence?
Poor achievement amongst children of any age is often caused, at least in part, by the poverty of their environment. They live in homes where their parents
suffer considerable stress, or in homes where there is often inadequate heating, so there is nowhere warm in winter to do their homework. They live in overcrowded homes where there is often nowhere they can quietly work in any case, whether the temperature outside is warm or cold. They live in homes where there are no books, because their parents cannot afford to buy them or are unaware of the importance of children having access to them. They live in homes where their parents are struggling to feed them and therefore cannot afford to pay for the extra-curricular activities that schools provide—activities that are often of enormous educational value. So, the Government really have got it the wrong way round. I of course accept that the relationship between cause and effect is very complex. Children who grow up with poor achievement related to the income poverty of their homes will leave school with poor achievement, and then find it more difficult to get employment and to secure an income. So, there is a continuation of this process.
Turning to rent arrears, I chair a housing association and I know that some of its clients, like many others, have enormous difficulty paying their rents, and some will have greater difficulty as a result of this legislation. If you cannot pay your rent, you are at huge risk of being evicted and becoming homeless, particularly if you are in private rented accommodation. What does that do for the lives of children? They will be living in even worse accommodation, their educational opportunities will be even more damaged, and they will often be emotionally damaged by the instability of having to move house into often appalling accommodation.
I understand that the Government are interested in problem debt. Problem debt does not cause poverty but is an effect of it: people get into debt because they do not have enough money to run their lives and to provide a reasonable quality of life for their children. The same is true of drug and alcohol dependency. Of course it contributes to poverty, but often, very poor people turn to such abusive forms of behaviour, which do huge damage to themselves and to their children, because they are in such serious and unacceptable poverty.
Will the Minister spell out in some detail where he and the Government are getting the advice from to drop these long-established measures, and state just how these other measures can possibly be a satisfactory answer in that regard? I just cannot understand how anybody could accept such an argument. It is intellectually a very poor position to take.
I do not want to deny that the Minister and, indeed, the Government as a whole, are serious about the issue of poverty, particularly amongst children, but I am confused. If they are serious, why are they not prepared to accept the publicity that derives from findings showing that we are not being as successful as we should be in tackling poverty? Are they not courageous enough to look at this evidence, say they are concerned about it and think of ways to deal with it? Let us please be more courageous in collecting this evidence, so that we can be better informed about the extent and nature of this very serious problem—which is a problem not just now, but for the future—and think of ways to resolve it.