My Private Member's Bill sets out to introduce a target to reduce Child Poverty. As in life, if you want to achieve something in Government, it is useful to set a target. I believe setting a target would help realise a common purpose to tackle child poverty, which includes communities, employers and government at every level.

The Bill seeks to:

• Set an ambitious new target based on the 60% income measure .
• Potentially set interim targets to measure progress.
• Set a duty on ministers to meet the target.
• A duty on local authorities to assess the needs of children living in poverty in their area and to produce a child poverty strategy. The 2010 Act required co-operation with partner agencies including district councils, police and criminal justice, transport & health authorities.
• Future governments to be bound by the duty.
• Place a duty on Government to report to Parliament on progress annually.
• Responsibility on minister to detail to parliament reasons if progress is not being made; or when an interim target is missed, if we set an interim target.
• Require framework for development of policy across depts and at all levels of government.
• Require distributional analysis to be published alongside budgets & autumn statement.
• Requirement for the impact on child poverty of all tax and spending decisions combined, alongside every budget and autumn statement.
• Consider changes to the regularity child poverty statistics are published.