Welfare Reform Bill (Instruction)

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

I beg to move,

That it be an instruction to the Welfare Reform Bill Committee that it has power to make provision in the Bill to establish the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

This debate is focused on the motion and I do not intend to go through the purpose and effect of the proposed new clause in detail. Members will have the opportunity to debate the measure in full in the remaining stages of the Welfare Reform Bill, including in Committee. However, it may help hon. Members if I set out the Government’s reasons for this change.

We need to be sure that we have the right structures in place to hold the Government to account on child poverty. The previous Government attempted to do that by enshrining in law a child poverty commission. The commission was intended to provide independent scrutiny and to ensure that progress would continue to be made by Government. We supported and still support the concept of an arm’s length body to provide such an external challenge to Government. However, having considered carefully how best to establish the commission to ensure that it can fulfil that purpose, we do not believe that the child poverty commission, as currently defined in legislation, has the necessary remit or power to perform that function effectively.

Why do we want to change the commission? There are three reasons, which I will outline for the House. First, the commission cannot assess or comment on the progress made by Government on child poverty, meaning that it has no power to hold the Government to account. Secondly, we believe that the commission’s advisory role undermines accountability and provides Ministers with a means to delegate decision making to an arm’s length body. For a Government to consult on an important policy matter is absolutely proper, but responsibility should ultimately rest with Ministers. Finally, the scope of the commission is simply too narrow and does not cover issues that are crucially related to child poverty, such as life chances and social mobility. As I have said, this debate is not the place to go into the detail of the proposed new clause. It is intended to address the concerns that I have raised and to ensure that the commission has the functions and power that it needs to drive progress effectively and hold the Government to account.

It is appropriate to use the Welfare Reform Bill to make this change because helping people who are dependent on welfare to help themselves is one of its key aims. The reforms are designed to do that in two distinct ways. First, by ensuring that work always pays and is seen to pay, they will improve work incentives for people who are out of work. Secondly, by simplifying the benefits system, they will increase the take-up of benefits. It is therefore appropriate to use this Bill to make other legislative changes that allow the Government to take forward their new approach to tackling disadvantage, deprivation and welfare dependency in our society, such as these revisions to the child poverty commission.

Why is it necessary to make these changes now? We felt that it was important to consult stakeholders before making changes to the commission. We therefore decided to include our thoughts on the commission in our child poverty strategy consultation document, which was published in December last year. The consultation closed this February, after which it was necessary to consider the responses before deciding how the commission should be revised. Given that time scale, it was not possible to include the proposed new clause in the original version of the Welfare Reform Bill. Since then, we have set out clearly the changes that we wish to make to the commission and emphasised the need for it to be established as soon as possible. If we had waited for a second-Session Bill to put the required changes to the House, it is possible that a commission would not have been established until 2013, and we do not believe that delay is acceptable.

I restate that our intention is to move a new clause to the Bill, amending the Child Poverty Act 2010 by inserting a new section 8 and corresponding schedule. The new provisions will extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We believe that the motion will give us the opportunity to create a stronger and more effective commission, and I commend it to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Miller]

With the leave of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker, I should like to respond to some of the comments made in the debate, and first of all to thank the hon. Member for Glasgow East (Margaret Curran) for her support for the motion. It was interesting and useful to hear the comments of right hon. and hon. Members in this debate, and I am grateful for the points that they have raised.

The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) raised an important point on the language that we use to describe such issues to people who perhaps do not live and breathe them in the same way that we do. That is important, but it is not, along with a number of issues raised by hon. Members, fully within the scope of today’s debate. We should debate such things in Committee, on Report or on Third Reading.

Tonight’s motion is on extending the scope of the Bill to enable that debate, and I am glad that so many hon. Members agree that the measure is appropriate. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead spoke of the importance of child care and getting full responses to his report, particularly on the early years. I remind him and hon. Members that we are committed to consulting on various options on child care and universal credit, although I am asking your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker, in straying that far.

The hon. Member for Glasgow East made a number of points, and I hope to cover a few of them. I point her and other hon. Members who commented on the broadening of the commission’s role to our consultation on the various ideas in our child poverty strategy. I remind them that we received 280 responses to that consultation, which was more than those received to the consultation on the original Child Poverty Act 2010. Only around 6% of people who responded felt that broadening the commission’s role was inappropriate. That shows that people understand the value of broadening the issues that are examined when we address child poverty, and that we cannot view children in isolation from either their communities or their families. Hopefully, hon. Members understand and agree with that.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made a number of important points. She asked whether the Government remain committed to the 2010 Act. I should like to say a very clear, loud yes to that. The Government are clearly committed to the income targets in the Act, but as I outlined and as I am sure she will agree, tackling child poverty is not just about lifting people above an arbitrary income line; it is about ensuring that they have the support, incentives and skills necessary to create a better life for themselves. I hope that she would also agree on the importance of incorporating that principle into the commission’s work. We are looking at the root causes of poverty, not simply dealing with its symptoms and moving finances and moneys about.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) raised a number of issues, but I would particularly like to pick up on the one about how tackling child poverty is about more than income. She has my wholehearted support for her sentiments. Using targets in isolation has in the past focused policy on short-term solutions, leading to vast sums of money being spent on financial support without fundamentally changing the causes of poverty. I welcome her support for our approach and the opportunity that will no doubt be afforded by her membership of the Welfare Reform Bill Committee to debate the detail and substance of some of the issues she raised.

The hon. Member for Glasgow East talked about the broadening of the commission—in fact, this was also raised by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell)—and was worried that we were diluting the powers of the commission. I would challenge that; we are doing quite the opposite. We are actually reinforcing the commission’s powers by giving it the opportunity to range more broadly over those issues that really affect the life chances of young people in this country. The commission’s duty to report annually on progress towards reducing child poverty will ensure that the issue remains high on the Government’s agenda, and I am sure that nobody needs reminding that it is also in our coalition agreement.

The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington mentioned the expertise on the commission, which might be an issue that we can discuss in Committee or perhaps on the Floor of the House on Report. One reason we believed that it was important to move to a child poverty and social mobility commission, rather than simply remaining with the legislation as it was, was precisely the one he raised: we wanted to ensure that that broader expertise was put in place.

Many other issues have been raised today, but I want to touch on just one more before I close. Hon. Members asked why we believed that the reformed child poverty commission would be more powerful, and why it mattered that instead of having an advisory function, its role should be to hold the Government to account. We believe fundamentally that Ministers are responsible for the strategies put forward. However, section 10 of the 2010 Act clearly allows the Secretary of State to devolve to the commission responsibility for establishing a strategy or to act on advice in a way that could place on it responsibility for that strategy. This is really important and is at the heart of the coalition Government’s approach to ministerial responsibility. We do not believe that the commission should be responsible for the strategy; that is the role of Ministers. That is one of the fundamental changes that we are making, and it will ensure that the role of the commission is to hold us to account for the work we are doing. We do not want to defer responsibility to a commission that after all is not accountable at the ballot box. That is one of the important changes we have made.

In conclusion, we believe that these changes will ensure that the commission is an effective and efficient public body with the necessary powers to fulfil its duties and to hold Government properly to account. Moreover, they will remove the requirement on the commission as currently defined. It is a public body that cannot provide the taxpayer with value for money. There will be further opportunities to debate the content and detail of some of the issues raised today as we move through the various stages of the Bill. However, I hope that I have reassured hon. Members that allowing these changes is both necessary and beneficial to the cause of tackling child poverty, and I commend the motion to the House.

Question put and agreed to.