Lord Bird (CB)

Amendment 163 in my name would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets and report on them annually to Parliament. This amendment will hold the Government to their promise to reduce child poverty and enable them to measure their progress. This amendment would secure long-term focus on tackling child poverty which transcends changes of government. I have listened to the former discussion and I am of the opinion that a lot of government and parliamentary time goes into chasing the horse once the horse has bolted. That is one of the big problems we have. We are talking about food and the fact that our children do not get fed properly; the poverty of knowledge, experience and need means that there are many millions of children in this country who have inherited poverty and, because they inherited poverty, they have a particular attitude towards food. I myself came from the Tizer-swilling, ice cream, Kit-Kat, Twix generation that took all those sorts of things, largely because that was what was on offer. I was culturally educated and socially created in that tradition. I would like to see the Government have targets on reducing poverty, and I would like to have a debate on how we reduce it. I am not saying that I stand against the idea of giving children food—I welcome it. We welcomed it in the Big Issue and we celebrated the occasions when people like Marcus Rashford rushed forward and said, “Let’s have more food and free school meals for children”. I am a great believer in that. But the point is, when are we going to move beyond always responding once the horse has bolted? When are we going to move to a situation where we prevent children needing this? One of the things that we could be doing is setting targets. We would be helping the Government, and ourselves, to look at all the things we can do to get rid of poverty, prevent poverty and cure people of poverty. I do not think that being well fed at school will necessarily make enormous changes to the trajectory of your life if you have been an inheritor of poverty. That is one of the major problems that we have. We have this situation where we are always coming up with bright and clever pilots, programmes and initiatives. Governments spend an enormous amount of time doing that. I would love a situation where we try to say goodbye to poverty, and that will mean moving beyond these emergencies. I listen to the Government and the debates in society and I feel, in a way, that they are not much different from refugeeism. They are not much different from the internal refugees who exist in Britain: the people in the poorest situations who have inherited poverty. What we are doing is trying to make poverty a little bit more comfortable. I am calling for the Government to have targets so that we can measure the effects of their efforts and advise and help them to move beyond this emergency-ism into prevention and cure-ism. Those are the kinds of areas I am interested in and why I tabled Amendment 163. Will the Government commit to targets to reduce child poverty? Will the child poverty strategy include targets? I beg to move.