My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate. I am no social security expert, but I did have quite a lot to do with these issues when I worked in 10 Downing Street as Tony Blair’s Europe adviser. My intervention was prompted by what my noble friend Lady Blackstone said.
It is not very popular today to talk about the admirable things that new Labour did, but I am certainly happy to do so. In 1997, we inherited a situation where, I think, 25% of children were living in poverty. That was the new Labour inheritance. It was the result of de-industrialisation, the downgrading of social security and all that had happened in the Thatcher years.
We did not run away from the fact that 25% of children were living in poverty; we tried to do something about it. What is more, as members of the European Union, we were very happy to measure ourselves against the performance of other members of the European Union on the score of tackling poverty and social exclusion.
Actually, Britain’s record in this area is pretty deplorable and, I am afraid to say, still is not very good. One of the things we did was support a comprehensive set of indicators that was devised to measure poverty and social exclusion. This was done by a working group under the leadership of probably the most distinguished economic statistician of his generation, Sir Tony Atkinson. We were glad to see this comprehensive set of measures, including the standard measures of child poverty and lots of other measures of social inclusion, because we wanted to learn from the experience of other countries about how best to try to tackle the deeply embedded problem of child poverty.
It seems to me now that the Conservative Government appear to be trying to treat Britain, as it were, as a special case. They no longer want to see Britain compared to other countries on the standard measures. They want to devise their own measures in relation to what they think matters. This is deplorable because all of us in this House ought to share those ambitions and we all ought to be able to see how we are doing in relation to other countries and learn from the experience of other countries.
The second point I will make about what I remember from 20 years ago is that when we came in, I was certainly very convinced by the argument that the best answer to poverty was a job. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, shares that view. There is a lot of truth in that proposition, but as time has gone on and we have seen how polarisation in our labour market has increased—and it has increased dramatically in the last two decades—and we have seen the spread of low-paid and insecure work, it is much more the case now than it was 10 or 20 years ago that people can be in poverty and have a job at the same time. That is why I thought that the speeches made about the importance of measuring in-work poverty were so right. This is a problem of our times: it has become a much more serious problem, and if we try to turn our back on it, we will betray the cause of a more socially just society.