My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this debate and for introducing it in his typically powerful, inimitable style. However, I am afraid that I have to disagree with him that poverty is a characteristic of individuals, families or communities. It is a condition imposed on individuals, communities, families, cities and countries by an economic system that directs large amounts of resources to the few and denies them to the many. People are robbed of the shared resources that have been created by past generations and maintained by the labour of the current generation, many of whom are now living in poverty.

If we think back to the Covid pandemic, there was a focus on essential workers such as delivery drivers, supermarket shelf stackers, and care workers, and many of their children are those who are living in poverty. I also have to disagree with the noble Lord about social housing. Decent housing is a human right. It should be an essential service provided by our society. We have almost forgotten that back in 1979 almost half the British population lived in social housing. Back then, the rate of poverty was 13.7%; in 2023, the figure was 22%. The destruction of social housing is a significant factor in that.

I want to address the term “child poverty”. We have become used to “poverty” coming with a qualifier. We often talk about food poverty, energy poverty, period poverty and hygiene poverty. There is a risk with those qualifiers that we lose sight of the essential situation. We have a society that is riven with poverty, with lives right across the age groups blighted by the inability to access the basics of a decent life.

The State of Ageing report released last November showed that 20% of retired people do not have enough income to meet their basic needs and 25% of people aged 60 to 64 are living in poverty. That pretty well matches the figures that have already been cited for children. One in five—2.6 million in total—are living in absolute poverty before housing costs, with one in four—3.6 million—in poverty after housing costs.

Many in this House if asked to define a successful economy would use that hoary old chestnut, gross domestic product, and point to the growth from 2010 when the current governing party came to power. In 2010, the GDP was £1.87 trillion; in 2023, it was £2.27 trillion. Apparently, that is a sign of progress and success. Yet, I and the Green Party say that the job of our economy and our society is to meet everybody’s basic needs, while caring for the environment on which all our lives and “the economy” depend. If we use that as a judgment, what a failure that growth has been.

Why is that the case? The noble Lord, Lord Bird, challenged us with the “why”. I am going to use the “D” word—distribution. We have a society that profoundly misdistributes our resources, not to mention destroys our environment. Growth over decades has benefited the few, while the lives of the many have gone backwards. The root cause of child poverty—and poverty—is our failure to distribute fairly the goods and services of which our society has plenty. Our current economic system and our benefits system have failed. We have failed to maintain and support the basic physical and social infrastructure of our communities.

There are, however, many reasons why child poverty is a particular tragedy. Anyone now under the age of 18—a child—has had no part in creating the system they have to live in. Anyone under the age of 22 has had no say in our Westminster politics, yet they live every day with the consequences. They suffer not just from poverty and a lack of access to resources but from a lack of access to power.

That poverty is defining the shape of those children’s bodies and of their lives. As the head of an education trust in east Yorkshire, Jonny Uttley of the Education Alliance, reported, what does child poverty mean? It means regularly going to school hungry. It means not having the money for lunch. It means not being able to wash your sports kit. It means being unable to sleep at night because of cold, and how do you study the next day if you have not been able to sleep?

It is important to draw on the work of the Centre for Cities, acknowledging how this maldistribution is regional as well as by household. It found that the cities where the child poverty figures are the worst are overwhelmingly concentrated in the north of England and the Midlands. A child in Burnley is four times as likely to be in absolute poverty as a child in Cambridge, and a child in Manchester is twice as likely to be in absolute poverty as a child in London—yet we have had lots of growth.

We need a plan to tackle child poverty. We need first to acknowledge a failure of our economy, the failure of our society and, at its base, the failure of our politics, not just over the last 14 years but over decades. Power and resources are concentrated here in Westminster; Westminster has failed. The politics and the ideology since the Second World War have failed. We need a new kind of politics and a new political system.

Given I have a minute more, I will focus on one issue that a number of noble Lords have already raised, which is the two-child benefit cap. Six out of 10 families affected by that have at least one member in work. Almost half are single parents. If we continue with the current plan, half of families with three or more children will be in poverty by 2028-29. That is up from a third in 2013-14, when the policy was introduced. I give as a case study Frances, who lives in London. Her third child was a baby when her relationship broke down. She now has children aged 11, six and three. She had to leave her job because she could not afford childcare. She was a business administrator. She was not in any way a classic person in poverty, yet the two-child benefit limit is putting her in poverty. The Minister has already been challenged on this and I am afraid I am going to challenge the Labour Front Bench: surely Labour will have to abolish the two-child benefit cap in government.