My Lords, I am keen to follow up on the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud. She has asked the right questions, if I may say so, but I do not go with her on some of her responses. First, she criticised relative poverty as a measure for assessing income poverty and is therefore throwing it out and retaining only worklessness and the educational attainment of children at the age of 16 as her main drivers. She did not remind the Committee that relative poverty is one of four indicators that include persistent poverty, absolute poverty and material deprivation. She is right to say that relative poverty reflects what is happening to the broader economy, but you need the other considerations and measurements as well, which we have. Taken in the round, they—particularly persistent poverty—are an appropriate, proper and dynamic snapshot of what is happening to families. I think that she will recognise that.
Secondly, the noble Baroness asked exactly the right question, which is this: why is it that half of people in poverty come out of it the following year but the other half are stuck, and how do we get to those who are stuck? If we look at what the Government are proposing in this Bill, and have been proposing through the summer, we will see that the reasons people are going to be stuck in poverty and therefore move into persistent poverty are being made worse on almost every count. People in work and in poverty who have poor skills certainly need job progression; that is well established. However, the primary reason why people are in work and have low pay and therefore are in poverty is because their work is part-time, insecure, or based on zero-hour contracts where from one week to the next they do not know whether they will be working for 10 hours or 30 hours, or they have young children. Most of us would not wish to see lone parents being forced, against their judgment of what is best for their family, to leave a two or three year-old in professional childcare while they work on a supermarket till when they feel that they should be trying to balance their work and life responsibilities—rightly so in terms of working part-time, but also in terms of bringing up their children so that those children can respond to the fact that simultaneously they have a parent at work and a parent at home. It can be hard for children, so we should not make it harder. That is a debate which I do not doubt we shall return to.
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What are the other reasons that the noble Baroness offered for why families get stuck? The reasons she ignored were in fact very interesting, because the biggest single reason why those families get stuck in poverty and do not get out is because they have another child. They are in larger families; they have three children, or more. What helped them in the past were child tax credits, which were paid to all children, so the position of that family was not deteriorated because of having an extra child. What are the Government going to do? They will make larger families
poorer, thus ensuring that what might have been temporary poverty for one year will now be persistent poverty because you do not dump your kids. While you have those children you will be in persistent poverty, and not be able to get out until in due course—in five, 10 years down the line—a second earner in the family, usually the woman, will be able to go into work. That will take that family out of poverty. While you have a larger family—the debate that we had on Monday—the earnings of the single earner will not be enough to lift that family. The noble Baroness has signed up to that policy, which undermines almost everything she has said about the need to help families who are stuck to get out of poverty.
Finally, the noble Baroness talked about debt and drug abuse, and the report that she, my noble friend Lady Lister and I quoted states that this has only limited effect because the numbers are very small. We know the drivers. The first driver is low pay because of part-time work. That reflects either family size or the labour market conditions of insecure, part-time, temporary contract work. The Government, on the contrary to helping those families, are making the situation worse. We know the second driver is large families, and the Government are making that driver worse and making the poverty of those families even harder to escape. If the Government refuse to include an income measurement at all—it should be that of persistent poverty, if they would only keep the stats—how will they measure the effectiveness of their policies? They simply will not know. It just becomes: “This is our belief—it is debt. This is our belief—it is drug addiction”. There is no evidence for that if you do not keep the stats of why families cannot leave persistent poverty. By abandoning an income measurement the Government are saying, “We assert that these are the drivers of poverty, but don’t trouble us with the evidence for its subsequent measurement to see whether we are spending public money appropriately”.
No Government should take that position. If a Government claim that this is what drives poverty, they should be willing to expose that to the light of statistical evidence. They are walking away from that. The only reason most of us deduce from that is: you do not believe that the results will justify your measures. I fear that that is right.