---

Child Poverty Bill

I should hope so. I feel very strongly about this. The Minister knows that I am a great champion of service user involvement but obviously the Child Poverty Commission is not analogous to an advisory body in the health and social care field. However, I hope that at least one member of the commission will have had some experience of the benefits system and that it will not be made up only of people with degrees in social science. It will need people with a wide range of experience and, if such people have to fulfil some kind of box-ticking exercise, that might put off at least one of the people we want to see on the commission. I do not see why Parliament should not have some say in this. It is very worrying if it is all to be left to the Civil Service process. I understand that you cannot have Parliament deciding on every member of all these bodies, but surely we have a right to say who we think ought to be a member of the commission. I am not talking about the chairman or the deputy chairman but about one of the members. I am not suggesting either that this should be in the Bill, but I hope someone will notice what I am saying. I would like an everyday kind of person on the commission, not only clever academics.