Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-09
Topic: Mixed Topics
Francis Hare (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 25 in this group. Before I do so, I apologise to your Lordships for my overenthusiasm on Monday in Committee. I am afraid that I spoke too often and at too great a length, and therefore contributed substantially to the delay that day. I will seek to be shorter today. I have an amendment in this group and two or three in the next group, so please bear with me Amendment 25 would reintroduce into the Bill the four measures of child poverty that were introduced in the Child Poverty Act 2010. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, and regret with him that so much of that Act is being taken away by the Bill. I am concerned that this is a pattern one sees over the years: one Government come in and often undo the good work of the preceding Government. I am attracted to the approach Finland took towards its education system. Some years ago it began to be concerned about the quality of its education system, and a cross-party consensus was built that what was most important was to recruit and retain the best teachers and raise their status. Some 15 years down the line, it has the best-performing education system in the world. Therefore, in these important issues there is a lot to be said for building on the best of what is produced by whatever Government and not simply taking away what was put in place before The first time I met the noble Lord, Lord Freud, he was just publishing or launching his report for the Labour Government into improving employment. He has a very single-minded and focused passion to get more people in this country into work and is a supreme advocate of the value and importance of work not only to the nation and its economy but to its individual citizens. It was my privilege to work with the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on the education legislation coming through, and he in his turn is very focused on improving education incomes, principally through developing more academies. I pay tribute to the huge success the Government have had in getting more of our people into work in this difficult time. I make these points because I hope that the Minister might be prepared to be broad-minded and embrace other approaches which might help him to achieve the outcomes he wishes to achieve I read with great interest the speech of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to his party conference, when he spoke about the importance of social justice and social mobility and in particular about looked-after children and improving their outcomes. I suggest that the Government may be missing a trick here. Yes—more work and improving educational outcomes are important. However, a very important contribution to both of those is to address income poverty. A child attending school who has not eaten the night before or had breakfast may well find it hard to do well at school. If there is not the transport to enable families to see each other and keep connections, they may well suffer from isolation or mental ill health and the family can decline. If these measures were reinstated in the Bill, that would help the Government with regard to their aims on social mobility The Minister may wish to refer to the letter from the Children’s Commissioners for the UK, which was copied to me. The Children’s Commissioners of the UK—for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland—wrote to the Minister supporting this amendment on reintroducing the measuring of child poverty, and they made a very powerful case. I look forward to the Minister’s response and I hope that he can be sympathetic. From our previous discussions, and from listening to his response at Second Reading, I have the sense that he is strongly opposed to these proposals but I hope that perhaps, on reflection, he might be able to see that this will enrich and support what he proposes and not be a hindrance to it.