My Lords, I support the right reverend Prelate and thank him for moving this amendment, to which I have added my name. I will mention two principal reasons for my doing so. One is a concern that I think and hope is shared around the House: the changing nature of a Parliament and the experience of families that grow up in poverty. It is very easy to avoid meeting families in poverty. Many of the leaders of this country will perhaps have been educated privately from a young age, and there may have been few reasons for them to come into contact with families in poverty. They may never have worried
about where the next meal will come from or whether they can afford to heat their homes, and they may not mix with people who have those worries. My personal experience of course is that I and my family have never had to worry about whether our home could be heated or whether there would be enough money for the next meal. However, the families we are talking about worry about whether they can feed their children and whether they will have to go without a meal to feed their children.
I recently met with Ms Lorna Sculley, who is a 36 year-old and has three boys: the oldest is 15 and the youngest is fairly new-born. She works for 16 hours a week and lives in poverty, so she is one of the “working poor” that the right reverend Prelate described. During her last pregnancy and maternity leave, there were difficulties with her benefit payments, which meant that she got into debt and had difficulty in meeting her rent. She became increasingly desperate. Fortunately, there was a food bank local to her. With the help of the education welfare officer, she was referred to the people running the food bank and she sought their help. Not only did they provide much-needed food for her and her boys but they gave her advice about how to negotiate with the benefit system and to catch up as much as possible. Unfortunately, I think that it is possible to get only a three-month rebate if one has had these sorts of slips, so she could not gain all the money that she needed. She also told me that, because she is working, her boys are not entitled to free school meals and it can be particularly difficult to get severe hardship payments. Her two older boys had destroyed their mattresses by jumping up and down on them but it was hard to get the money to replace them.
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My fear is that, unless we include an amendment of the kind that the right reverend Prelate has suggested, or unless the Minister can give a clear commitment to the House at this point that a statutory measure of poverty will be developed on the basis set out in the amendment, perhaps looking particularly at material poverty, this constituency may get lost because it is so alien to the experience of many of us. As is so often the case, the people with the highest needs—those who need the most attention in our society—often have the smallest voices and are the least well represented, so I beg the Minister to give the assurances that the right reverend Prelate has asked for, and I look forward to his response.