UK Parliament / Open data

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

My Lords, it is me again. I shall speak also to Amendments 36 to 45, 47 and 48 and make clear my support for Amendment 32, which makes explicit mention of child poverty. I shall also oppose Clause 5 standing part of the Bill.

I am grateful to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for help with the amendments. In its Second Reading briefing, it pointed out that the requirement in the Child Poverty Act 2010 for the Secretary of State to consult on, review, lay and publish a triennial child poverty strategy is one of the casualties of Clause 6. It therefore called for a new statutory requirement

for the Secretary of State to develop a regular life- chances strategy. Amendments 31 and 32 are alternative ways of implementing that recommendation. I prefer Amendments 47 and 48 because they are closer to the original and make explicit reference to the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on children’s life chances while decoupling the strategy from the income-related targets—the Minister will be pleased to hear that—which the Government have unfortunately abandoned. They are clearly decoupled.

At present, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is required to work with the Department for Education and the Child Poverty Unit to produce a child poverty strategy. The publication of the strategy provided a very useful focus for civil society and academic engagement with the Government in developing their thinking on child poverty. Among the many helpful and illuminating responses to the last document published after a period of consultation were those from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and the JRF. All three were pretty critical, and I cannot help wondering whether the Government are trying to avoid such criticism by repealing the duty to produce any sort of strategy.

The JRF argues that a statutory strategy would help to focus the Government’s action on their stated desire to improve the life chances of households and give the Secretary of State the impetus to drive this agenda across government and to challenge other departments to commit resources to this end. I would have thought that would have been quite attractive to the Secretary of State. But the most important reason it gives for writing such a strategy into legislation is that it would increase the opportunity for scrutiny of the Government.

The process of drafting a strategy would require public consultation followed by the publication of a clear plan for the improvement of life chances over a three-year period. This document would therefore be a means by which the Government could be held to account by the electorate, opposition parties and other interested organisations. In case the Minister refers to the reporting duty in Clause 4 and the commitment to report on further non-statutory life chances indicators, I point out that reporting on data does not constitute a strategy. Reporting on data, important as it is, is backward-looking. Publishing a strategy is forward-looking and provides a framework within which and a benchmark against which to assess the data.

5.15 pm

I am pleased to say that a briefing note refers to a life chances strategy, to be published “in due course”, whatever that means. Given that, I hope that the Minister might be minded to take these amendments away and consider one or other of them in the interests of accountability and public engagement so as to strengthen such a strategy. Otherwise, I fear that he may be throwing out the baby of accountability with the bath water of targets, to the detriment of good governance and a coherent life chances strategy which, among other things, addresses the root causes of child poverty.

I would prefer it if Clause 5 did not stand part of the Bill. I have not yet heard any convincing justification for removing child poverty from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s remit. In the event that it survives, which no doubt it will, the purpose of the amendments is to align the commission’s remit with the new focus on life chances in the Bill itself. Noble Lords will recall that the commission started life as the Child Poverty Commission. Social mobility was added to its remit in the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

If, as Ministers constantly reassure us, the Government are still genuinely committed to working to eliminate child poverty, can the Minister explain why they no longer want the commission to help them in that task? I understand why the Government want to remove targets and change the measures, even though I think that they are wrong to do so, but I simply do not understand why any Government who are genuinely committed to the elimination of child poverty would in effect say to the commission, “Thank you for all the useful work you’ve done in analysing child poverty and its causes and in advising on policies to eliminate it, but we’re not interested any more, so in future please just focus on social mobility”.

When announcing the measure, the Work and Pensions Secretary explained, if that is the right word, that the rebranded commission,

“will ensure independent scrutiny and advocate for increased social mobility”,

thereby ensuring that,

“tackling the root causes of child poverty”,

becomes “central” to the,

“business of a one nation government”.

I am sorry, but that struck me as a piece of sophistry right out of Alice’s looking glass world. How do you make child poverty central to the business of government by removing it from the remit of the one body set up to advise government on child poverty? I can only conclude that the Government are more interested in eradicating the language and concept of child poverty than in eradicating child poverty itself. So in the interests of helping the Government keep to their welcome, oft-repeated commitment to the elimination of child poverty, we should oppose the proposition that Clause 5 should stand part of the Bill.

Before turning to the amendments, I will ask the Minister to clarify the future of the Child Poverty Unit. Although the unit is not independent in the way the commission is, it at least ensures a cross-departmental focus on child poverty. Can he give an assurance that the unit will continue once the Bill becomes law and once it has produced the non-statutory indicators to measure progress against the other root causes of child poverty that he mentioned at Second Reading? If there is no independent commission to assess that progress, the unit’s work becomes that much more important.

I tabled the amendments partly because I was genuinely puzzled as to why the Government did not use this opportunity to rename the commission the “Life Chances Commission” in line with their emphasis on life chances in the Bill. At Second Reading the Minister underlined that the Government’s new approach is the life chances one, focused on transforming lives through tackling the root causes of child poverty, and he referred to the

new statutory measures as key life chances measures. Therefore, would it not make sense to call the commission the “Life Chances Commission” and to amend its remit accordingly? In that way, it could assist the Government in their aim of tackling the root causes of child poverty without having to spell out the CP words in its title, and, as social mobility is related to life chances, it could still report on social mobility.

I welcome the Government’s introduction of the concept of life chances because I believe that that is preferable to the narrower meritocratic notion of social mobility. In my previous life as an academic, I sat on the Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, who is no longer in his seat. We defined life chances as referring to the likelihood of a child achieving a range of important outcomes which occur at successive stages of the life course, from birth and early childhood to late childhood and adolescence and on into adulthood. We argued that perhaps the most fundamental of all life chances is the chance to live a fulfilling and rewarding life beginning in childhood. As such, children must be given the chance to enjoy a happy, flourishing childhood and to continue to thrive as they grow up. Thus, it is about caring about children as beings as well as “becomings” — both of which can be damaged by child poverty.

Our commission argued that poverty matters because it undermines people’s opportunity to flourish and thrive. Growing up in poverty affects children’s chances across a whole number of dimensions of life chances that I am sure concern the Government. From this perspective, we rejected the narrower concept of social mobility because, first, it does not embrace the idea of ensuring that everyone has a chance to live a full and flourishing life and, secondly, it ignores what happens to those who are not able, or may not want, to climb the ladder of social mobility. For example, a focus on social mobility ignores how some of society’s most important tasks—those involving caring for others—are undervalued and thus, in effect, are carried out at the bottom of the ladder. Do we want to say to children that it is an ignoble ambition to care for others?

I hope that the Minister will agree with what I have said—I do not think that there is anything controversial in what I have said about life chances—and that he might be willing, for once, to take away this amendment and consider it before Report, because I believe that it is helpful to the Government’s own cause. I believe that he would find widespread support for such a move, and it would show that the Government are willing to listen. I beg to move.

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

767 cc1590-3 

Session

2015-16

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber
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