Welfare Reform Bill (Instruction)

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I very much look forward to a full debate on the merits of the Government’s proposal in the remaining stages of the Welfare Reform Bill if the instruction is agreed to. However, I cannot wholly share the Minister’s reasoning on why it is appropriate to approach the expansion of the child poverty commission’s remit in this way.

The Minister said that allocating an advisory role to an arm’s length body would in some way weaken the Government’s accountability. I am confused about why advising should mean becoming responsible, and no doubt she will want to explain that. However, I welcome her acknowledgment of the importance of wide consultation. I hope that that will continue to be the case on the subject of the expanded remit that we are discussing.

I believe the Minister is mistaken to think that the planned child poverty commission would have had as limited a remit as she seemed to imply. As she acknowledged, the 2010 Act and the functions and remit of the commission had cross-party support, and the Act uses a wide understanding of what child poverty encompasses. That includes a number of the building blocks of social mobility, including on parenting, housing and education, that she seems to suggest would be missed. I hope that she can assure us that when the debate is passed on to the Welfare Reform Bill Committee, with its much narrower remit of considering employment and social security reforms, the vital focus on child well-being in its broadest sense will not be lost. That is what child poverty measures are fundamentally intended to address and improve.

I agree with the Minister that two central thrusts of the Government’s welfare reform agenda lie at the heart of our ambitions on social mobility. She is right that parental employment is crucial to how we tackle and address child poverty. Unless parents can access employment that genuinely lifts them and their children out of poverty, the child poverty targets cannot be met. She is right, too, to say that the Welfare Reform Bill is an appropriate vehicle for the discussion of child poverty. It is clear that neither child poverty nor social mobility can be addressed unless the right financial support is put in place for families with children. That includes the social security support that the Bill targets directly.

The reason I mention those two points is that there is considerable international evidence that parental earnings have as much impact on social mobility as other factors such as educational opportunity, and that the most socially mobile and equal countries are those with generous, albeit short-term, social security benefits. That is in striking contrast to the position that tends to pertain in this country and the United States, which is very ungenerous social security benefits that people rely on, in many cases, for quite a long time. It is therefore right that we should debate those issues in the context of the Welfare Reform Bill. In that sense, the Minister’s proposition absolutely stands up. However, this debate also gives us the opportunity to highlight the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Government’s agenda.

The meat of the Welfare Reform Bill includes issues such as the benefits cap, which will seriously damage families’ well-being, and the reduction in support for child care—we are still waiting in the Welfare Reform Bill Committee to see exactly what the Government will propose, although I think that the Opposition will have concerns about it—as well as access to the labour market for second earners or potential earners in couples and the disincentives that seem to be emerging in the design of the universal credit. They are all issues crucial to child poverty and social mobility, and it is right that they should lie at the heart of the Bill.

In conclusion, it is right to debate those issues in the context of the Welfare Reform Bill, albeit not just in that context. Doing so gives us an opportunity to remind ourselves that we tackle poverty, inequality and social fluidity not by individualising and pathologising problems, but through the structural solutions that only Governments can provide. Those solutions include ensuring access to education and training, ensuring that parents can access good quality child care, ensuring income adequacy, ensuring the redistribution of income and wealth to reduce the inequality gap, and ensuring the conditions for sustainable, good quality employment that genuinely enables parents to lift their families out of poverty.

The Government need to be aware that they have at least the beginnings of a credibility problem with those outside this House who are watching and monitoring closely their commitment genuinely to improving the well-being of children and lifting them out of poverty, as the coalition parties, in common with all other parties, last year signed up to do. I very much hope that what we are seeing this evening is not a proposition to marginalise or downplay hard-won gains in securing understanding of the inter-connectedness of poverty, inequality and social fluidity, and, at their heart, the importance of family incomes.