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Welfare Reform Bill (Instruction)

I beg to move,"That it be an instruction to the Welfare Reform Bill Committee that it has power to make provision in the Bill to establish the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission." This debate is focused on the motion and I do not intend to go through the purpose and effect of the proposed new clause in detail. Members will have the opportunity to debate the measure in full in the remaining stages of the Welfare Reform Bill, including in Committee. However, it may help hon. Members if I set out the Government's reasons for this change. We need to be sure that we have the right structures in place to hold the Government to account on child poverty. The previous Government attempted to do that by enshrining in law a child poverty commission. The commission was intended to provide independent scrutiny and to ensure that progress would continue to be made by Government. We supported and still support the concept of an arm's length body to provide such an external challenge to Government. However, having considered carefully how best to establish the commission to ensure that it can fulfil that purpose, we do not believe that the child poverty commission, as currently defined in legislation, has the necessary remit or power to perform that function effectively. Why do we want to change the commission? There are three reasons, which I will outline for the House. First, the commission cannot assess or comment on the progress made by Government on child poverty, meaning that it has no power to hold the Government to account. Secondly, we believe that the commission's advisory role undermines accountability and provides Ministers with a means to delegate decision making to an arm's length body. For a Government to consult on an important policy matter is absolutely proper, but responsibility should ultimately rest with Ministers. Finally, the scope of the commission is simply too narrow and does not cover issues that are crucially related to child poverty, such as life chances and social mobility. As I have said, this debate is not the place to go into the detail of the proposed new clause. It is intended to address the concerns that I have raised and to ensure that the commission has the functions and power that it needs to drive progress effectively and hold the Government to account. It is appropriate to use the Welfare Reform Bill to make this change because helping people who are dependent on welfare to help themselves is one of its key aims. The reforms are designed to do that in two distinct ways. First, by ensuring that work always pays and is seen to pay, they will improve work incentives for people who are out of work. Secondly, by simplifying the benefits system, they will increase the take-up of benefits. It is therefore appropriate to use this Bill to make other legislative changes that allow the Government to take forward their new approach to tackling disadvantage, deprivation and welfare dependency in our society, such as these revisions to the child poverty commission. Why is it necessary to make these changes now? We felt that it was important to consult stakeholders before making changes to the commission. We therefore decided to include our thoughts on the commission in our child poverty strategy consultation document, which was published in December last year. The consultation closed this February, after which it was necessary to consider the responses before deciding how the commission should be revised. Given that time scale, it was not possible to include the proposed new clause in the original version of the Welfare Reform Bill. Since then, we have set out clearly the changes that we wish to make to the commission and emphasised the need for it to be established as soon as possible. If we had waited for a second-Session Bill to put the required changes to the House, it is possible that a commission would not have been established until 2013, and we do not believe that delay is acceptable. I restate that our intention is to move a new clause to the Bill, amending the Child Poverty Act 2010 by inserting a new section 8 and corresponding schedule. The new provisions will extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We believe that the motion will give us the opportunity to create a stronger and more effective commission, and I commend it to the House.