Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Report (4th Day)

Amendment 107

107: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause— “Child poverty targets(1) The Secretary of State must, as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than 30 September 2026, and then at the start of each Parliament, lay regulations made by statutory instrument that establish binding child poverty targets.(2) Child poverty targets must include—(a) targets for reducing the number of children living in poverty,(b) targets for reducing the number of children living in deep poverty, and(c) timescales by which each target must be achieved.(3) The Secretary of State must lay an annual report before Parliament setting out—(a) steps they have taken to deliver on the child poverty targets, and(b) progress that has been made towards the child poverty targets.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets in regulations at the start of each Parliament.

I am very pleased that this amendment is to be discussed again. What troubles me is that it could be such a small, insignificant thing to ask for targets from the Government. Are targets part of the armoury that we use to get rid of poverty? If we are endeavouring to get rid of poverty, we will need more than targets. We will need houses; we will need training for parents so that they do not pass poverty down to the next generation; we will need a Government who will converge and co-ordinate all the efforts into some form whereby they can say that they are disentangling the situation.

At the moment, we have eight government departments dealing with poverty. I imagine that if we did not have a Ministry of Defence and people decided to attack this country, we would form a Ministry of Defence, bring everything together and not leave it to eight different ministries. The same goes for poverty. Poverty is destroying us. Poverty is stopping schools delivering schooling: 30% of teachers’ time is spent on the problems that are caused when poverty enters the classroom. In our health service, 50% of people who suffer from cardiological—whatever you call it; forgive me, I have new teeth—are suffering from food poverty.

I have used this amendment to raise not only the question of targets but the point that the Government should use them. They should have others measuring their homework rather than doing it themselves. I have heard from the Government that, if you have targets, you tend to have people massaging the figures to make it look as though the targets are being achieved and that you then go after the low-hanging fruit because you do not get anywhere near the hardest to reach—you can achieve your targets by concentrating on the fact that it is easier to help those who are the low-hanging fruit.

Overall, my big question is whether targets could fit in a panoply of organised, convergent energy that is used to get rid of poverty. I am not here to talk just about just this amendment but about the fact that every Government I know have had all sorts of initiatives to get rid of poverty, but we never see the end of it. Some 4.5 million children are caught in poverty and that is a tremendous indictment not of this Government nor of the last one, and not even of the Government before that, but of the methodology. It is an inherited methodology that is passed down every generation of Government and takes the same form.

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 107, to which I have added my name, moved by such a warrior against poverty, not least as it provides an opportunity to welcome the Government’s landmark child poverty strategy. Sadly, the Opposition did not think it important enough to ask for the Statement on it to be repeated in your Lordships’ House. I welcome, too, the strategy’s accompanying monitoring and evaluation frameworks, supported by a theory of change, based on clear measures and what it calls a “wide-ranging evidence base”. This includes hearing directly from children, young people and families with lived experience of poverty, building on the strong engagement with them during the strategy’s development.

However, what is missing is any yardstick against which stakeholders of all kinds and parliamentarians can judge the strategy’s success using the measures outlined. This is where this amendment comes in. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and the Big Issue for continuing to press this. An evaluation strategy without a yardstick, targets and milestones is like putting on “Hamlet” without the prince.

A common theme in the evidence submitted to the Child Poverty Taskforce was the need for statutory targets. For instance, the first of eight tests set by End Child Poverty, a coalition of over 120 organisations, was that the strategy

“must put in place legally binding, independently evaluated, targets that build clear milestones”.

Similarly, 40 practitioners with a range of expertise interviewed by the Child Poverty Action Group, of which I am honorary president, were unanimous that the forthcoming strategy must publicly set targets to reduce child poverty. Just this week, UNICEF UK’s CEO has written that achieving the national mission to give every child the best start in life must mean

“a visible target for driving down child poverty”.

In Committee, my noble friend the Minister made two main arguments against the inclusion of statutory targets. The first was that statutory targets

“would not in themselves drive reductions in poverty”

and can be reversed, and that more important is

“the nature of the Government at the time”.—[Official Report, 19/6/25; col. 2248.]