Child Poverty Unit

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government why they have abolished the Child Poverty Unit which was sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and HM Treasury.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, tackling child poverty and disadvantage is a priority for this Government, and we are convinced that there is a better approach than the one driven by the Child Poverty Act 2010 income-related targets. This is why we replaced them with statutory measures of parental worklessness and children’s educational attainment—the two areas that can make the biggest difference to children’s outcomes. We will build on these measures through our forthcoming Green Paper on social justice.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, that does not actually answer the Question. The abolition of the cross-departmental unit is widely seen as downgrading and weakening the government machinery dedicated to the eradication of child poverty. Could the Minister explain how the abolition of a cross-departmental unit co-sponsored by the Department for Education is consistent with the Government’s own analysis of the root causes of poverty as partly lying in children’s educational achievement? Surely their own approach, which rejects what they call a narrow income-based approach, strengthens rather than weakens the case for a cross-departmental unit.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am terribly sorry to say this, but I think I did answer the Question directly. What was the purpose of the child poverty unit? Its purpose was to measure the income-related targets set up by the previous Government. Those targets were a waste of time and we got rid of them. We have now set up something better—the Social Mobility Commission secretariat, based in the Department for Education. As I said in my original Answer, the appropriate measure for these things should be parental worklessness—a responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions—and children’s educational attainment, and those are the two that we will look at.