I speak as a father of young children, which is why I thought I would take part in the debate. Another point, which has not been mentioned so far, is that when the money becomes part of the monthly income for the first year of the child's life, there is a danger that the family will adjust to that pattern of income. They will not have been able to smooth out the payments to buy the lump-sum items, because they will have had to buy those items at the beginning. The danger is that families may get used to that standard of living, and then have the money taken away from them. The clause is not really about supporting families in poverty when babies are born, because, as my hon.
Friend says, that policy is now known as the sure start maternity grant, or whatever.
I believe that that is largely the same initiative, but it has to be renamed. They seem to suggest that a year is enough. Perhaps they will start pin-money jobs or work a day a week at Tesco, or whatever. I should be interested to hear the Paymaster General expand a little more on the Government's thinking, because they have not taken the action that they were expected to take on paid leave and so on. The Government clearly have a mechanism to get the money to every one of those families if they wanted to, but the problem is that they would have to use the benefits system.