Child Poverty

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this debate.

While individual circumstances and actions may represent proximate contributary causes, the root causes of child poverty are systemic and as such are amenable to government action. Unfortunately, for the most part, over the past decade or so, government actions, particularly with regard to social security, have served not to prevent or alleviate child poverty but to worsen and even deepen it.

No doubt the Minister will refer to this month’s benefits uprating to defend his Government’s record; we hear about it constantly from Ministers. While it is welcome that, this year, the Government are doing the right thing, it has to be understood in the context of the significant cut in the real value of working-age and children’s benefits since 2010. The recent Work and Pensions Committee report on benefit levels referred to the wide range of evidence received which suggests they are “too low”, and called for the development of a framework of principles, following consultation with stakeholders—and here I would include social security recipients themselves—to inform proper consideration of the adequacy of benefits.

The impact of overall cuts in real value has been aggravated by the imposition of what the Resolution Foundation described as the “catastrophic caps” of the two-child limit and benefit cap, which have been identified as key drivers of child poverty today. As such, any child poverty strategy will be strangled at birth so long as they continue.

While I welcome the six-month reprieve for the household support fund, could we not use that time to design a longer-term statutory programme that combined the fund with the existing discretionary local welfare assistance scheme—which, at the last count, 37 local authorities no longer run—so as to ensure a proper safety net at local authority level?

In the last poverty debate, led so successfully by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, the Minister reminded us that the Government’s approach is based on the importance of the role of paid work in lifting people out of poverty, which was echoed today by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham. While there is general agreement that access to paid work is important, it has to be good work and have proper regard to caring responsibilities, and it should not be imposed through the use of punitive mechanisms. Unfortunately, none of those conditions applies at present.

Moreover, when two-thirds of children in poverty are in families with at least one parent in paid work, it can only be a partial solution. In response to a recent Oral Question, the Minister responded to my call for a comprehensive cross-government child poverty strategy with the rather tired argument that it could drive action that simply moves the incomes of those “just in poverty” across the poverty line,

“while doing nothing to help those on the very lowest incomes or to improve children’s future prospects”.—[Official Report, 26/3/24; col. 576.]

Yet incomes are important and have been shown to make a real difference to children’s life chances. Depth of poverty indicators could, and indeed should, be included in any future targets, but the point of a comprehensive cross-government strategy—local as well as central— is that it would address the many facets of poverty that blight both childhood and children’s life chances. It would include all children, including those of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, whose poverty is the focus of a joint report to be published tomorrow by the APPG on Poverty and the APPG on Migration.

In conclusion, last week we lost a valiant crusader against child poverty, Lord Field of Birkenhead. It is shameful that the situation is worse today than it was when he and I worked at the Child Poverty Action Group in the 1970s.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Of course, and the noble Baroness will know that I have spoken at length on this matter and that there are a number of exceptions to this particular policy. But I stick to our view that there is a balance to be struck between helping those people in the way that we do, not having the two-child policy and, equally, being fair to the taxpayer. I know that the noble Baroness will never agree to that.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that many of these families are taxpayers and in paid work?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Absolutely. As I have said before, I do not think that we will agree at all on this—but, as I say, we are not minded to move on this policy. Both noble Baronesses will be well aware of our position on this.

There are encouraging signs that the economy has now turned a corner. Inflation has more than halved from its peak, delivering on the Prime Minister’s pledge, and is forecast to fall below 2% in 2024-25. Food price inflation is at its lowest since January 2022, at 4%, and wages are rising in real terms. We remain committed to a strong welfare system for those families who need it, and have uprated working-age benefits by a further 6.7% from this month and raised the local housing allowance to the 30th percentile of local rents, benefiting 1.6 million private renters in 2024-25.

Some questions were raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln and also alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about social housing, which is an important subject. Their questions were linked to items of damp and mould; they asked what the Government were going to do about this. The Government have now introduced Awaab’s law through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, which gives the Secretary of State powers to set out new requirements for social landlords to address hazards such as damp and mould in social homes within fixed time periods. We are now analysing the responses to the consultation, and then we will publish a response setting out findings and bringing for secondary legislation as soon as possible.

What I should say, which think was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is that everyone has a right to a safe and decent home. Since 2001, the decent homes standard, the so-called DHS, has played a key role in providing a minimum quality standard that social homes should meet. We are currently reviewing the DHS to ensure that it sets the right requirements for decency, and we will publish a consultation on a proposed new standard soon.