King Annette: Oral Questions — Questions to MinistersText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Oral Questions — Questions to Ministers[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:115. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]1.Hon ANNETTE KING (Acting Deputy Leader—Labour)to the Deputy Prime Minister: Will he make reducing child poverty a Better Public Service target given the statement in the Speech from the Throne that his Government will continue to “have a focus on poverty especially child poverty”?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister):Yes. The Government already has a number of Better Public Services related to children’s welfare and poverty and we have focused on these results because we believe they have a longer-term impact on child poverty—for instance reducing long-term welfare dependency increasing participation in early childhood education reducing assaults on children and in particular increasing educational achievement. These targets are published regularly in the fashion that no previous Government has been able to be held to account on in respect of progress on its social policy and the member is free to contribute any good ideas that she has to enable us to for instance reduce assaults on children or increase educational achievement.Hon Annette King: If child poverty is a Better Public Service target how will the Ministerial Committee on Poverty that he is to chair measure the success of the cross-Government approach announced as the method for focusing on poverty over the next 3 years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: That committee is likely to do the same thing as the Government and that is measure success in terms of better outcomes for real people. That is for instance higher levels of educational achievement and more people having their serious housing needs met which is not one of our formal targets but something we will be very focused on. Another one that has been topical recently is that we will measure success by trying to reduce the proportion of household incomes that is spent on housing costs because those have risen over the last 20 years particularly for low-income households.Hon Annette King: Will the ministerial committee use the EU measure of poverty as the Prime Minister did on Radio New Zealand this morning which when applied to New Zealand indicates 180000 children living with seven or more items of deprivation; if not what will the committee use to measure progress over the next 3 years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Of course we can use that measure. There is any number of income measures available including the EU threshold which is a bit lower actually than the one that was discussed during the election campaign. But those measures are all readily available. They are tracked regularly by the Ministry of Social Development. We have come up with a series of in many ways more challenging measures and those are ones that are directly related to the welfare of the children not just to the measure of the income of the household in which they live.Hon Annette King: The Prime Minister stated today: “There will be extra money to fight child poverty.” How much has he earmarked over the next 3 years to spend on this policy and how has he calculated the amount required?Hon BILL ENGLISH: That is all a matter for discussion. What we do know is that if you were going to try to shift some of the indicators such as with the EU measure then you would need to spend maybe several billion dollars to get some appreciable change. What the member can be reassured about is that the Government will take the investment approach; that is we will look at putting money in where we can see there are clearly going to be payoffs in the future as we have done with welfare dependency as we expect to be doing with housing and as we want to do with any number of other Government interventions.Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I wonder whether the Minister answered when I asked how much he had earmarked over the next 3 years to spend on this policy. He gave nothing other than airy-fairy sorts of answers about some money sometime somewhere.Mr SPEAKER: No on this occasion I think that to ask how much is being earmarked when budgets have not been presented by this new Government—I think the chance of getting an answer to that was not good. [Interruption] Order! The interjection question would have been better and I will invite the member to ask an additional supplementary question.Hon Annette King: Why is the Government to quote the Prime Minister “just starting to produce some paperwork on child poverty and a programme that we can work on.” when the Government already has numerous reports and one exceptional one from the Children’s Commissioner?Hon BILL ENGLISH: We do but as the member will well understand child poverty is a complex problem. Fortunately we are learning a lot more about what sorts of interventions might work which ones do not and too many of them do not. And so the work the Prime Minister is referring to is the ongoing evolution actually of issues this Government has been focusing on for the last 5 or 6 years.Hon Annette King: Was the Prime Minister correct when he stated this morning that 15 percent of children go to school hungry; if not is he prepared to spend some of the extra cash that is in the Budget for the next 3 years to provide some hard data not just guesswork and anecdotal stories about how many children go to school hungry?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Of course the Prime Minister was correct. There is quite an interesting issue—Hon Annette King: On what measure?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well there is an interesting issue around data and that is that most of the data held by the Government is organised around Government departments not around families and communities. That is one of the reasons why we cannot know for sure how many kids turn up to school without having had breakfast. One of the challenges for the Public Service is to reorganise the millions and millions of dollars’ worth of data that it has in a way that is much more relevant to decisions about families and communities not about Government departments.Hon Annette King: The Prime Minister has said that there are a number of children who live in an unacceptable level of material deprivation—how will the committee identify those children so that it can address their issues?Hon BILL ENGLISH: That is a very good question. The measures of hardship and deprivation are by definition statistical measures. What you then have to do is turn it into identifying actual families. The important point is this: the Public Service knows all these families—they are in our health population registers they are in our school enrolment registers they are in our State houses. The challenge is how to reorganise that information so that we can ensure that every single family in persistent deprivation is known to the Government and that for each one of those families we are thinking much more deeply about the interventions that will change their life course.Mr SPEAKER: Question—[Interruption] Order! I gave the additional one supplementary question not two.