WEDNESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2000

MS S MIDDLETON

  160. Only six months.
  (Ms Middleton) It would take six months.

  161. Would it be very expensive?
  (Ms Middleton) Good research comes expensive. I would estimate it would cost getting on towards £100,000 to redo the budget standards completely; to recost them would take a month for a very, very small amount of money.

  162. Maybe that is not a high price to pay. May I press you again? If your fairy godmother said there was £100,000 to do the research, would you stop the process until you got the data right before you took the further work which is necessary to get this introduced in a coherent way?
  (Ms Middleton) You would not need to stop the process. Actually knowing the answer about adequacy would not solve all the problems of implementation of delivery and all those other things we have talked about this morning. It would not stop the process. Whether it is using my methodology or anybody else's methodology, actually having a widely agreed level of adequacy of benefits for children and indeed for other people gives society a benchmark to judge what governments are doing. The level at which the eventual benefit is set is a political decision which has to be made in the context of competing demands for resources, but at least if we have some sort of agreed level of what you need to bring up a child to an adequate standard in this country today, we then can make some judgement in a democratic society about the extent to which governments are meeting those levels.

  163. If you started on Monday and you got on with it, there would be no cost necessarily involved in delaying the process because it could run in parallel, in your view. You would still have the information to have a sensible public discussion about the results of the research in time for the policymakers and Government to make final decisions in time for 2003 without delaying the process.
  (Ms Middleton) Yes.

  164. Is there anything else you think the Committee should be addressing itself to? Perforce these inquiries are always shorter than we would really like because time is precious for us too. Is there any special advice or signpost you would like to give the Committee in terms of the rest of the work on this inquiry?
  (Ms Middleton) I would come back to what I said about what the policy is trying to do, to think carefully about whether it is about work incentives, whether it is about reducing child poverty, whether it is about discouraging large families, what the policy is aiming to do. That is important. Also, to think more about measures of adequacy. There are several ways of setting adequacy thresholds but I do feel that to waste this opportunity to get a handle on adequacy for children would be a very great missed opportunity.

  165. Have you had a chance to see the paper submitted by Leonard Beighton and Don Draper to this Committee?
  (Ms Middleton) I looked at it very, very briefly on my long train journey from Leicester this morning.

  166. Would you like to comment on their central argument that WFTC favours lone parents over couples and that this structure is being carried over into the ICC system?
  (Ms Middleton) I should like to make a couple of points. One is about being very careful about what you are measuring. I noted in the paper as I was flicking through it, that the data is based on gross income. If you take housing costs, for example, the lone parent with one child is going to need equivalent housing, size, cost, to the two-parent with one child. So you are not really necessarily comparing like with like when you are thinking about gross income. That is the first thing I would say. Remember this is on the basis of a skim, but the other thing which caught my eye was the assertion that children in two-parent families do better than children in one-parent families. The jury is still out on that. The latest academic research suggests that it is not the fact of being in a one-parent family which makes the outcome worse for a child, it is the consistency of the household structure which matters.

  167. What does that mean?
  (Ms Middleton) What it means is that the child who actually experiences repeated changes in the course of their life from a one-parent to a two-parent to a one-parent to a two-parent structure is the one who suffers. If you look at the evidence of children who are lone-parented for most of their lives, the difference in outcomes vanishes. The jury is still out but there is that.

  168. I understand that point but I did not understand your point about gross incomes. Could you try to explain to me?
  (Ms Middleton) If you look at the figures in the report, and I may have this wrong, it seemed to me they were based on gross income. What that is saying is that it is not taking into account that these households—

  169. "These" being?
  (Ms Middleton) Lone-parent and two-parent households—will have similar housing costs or similar housing needs. As one example, the lone parent will therefore have to pay as much in housing as the two-parent family and therefore is proportionately spending more per person. That is one issue.

  170. That is why you have to pay them more.
  (Ms Middleton) Yes. There is a general issue. I have only scan-read it but in general you have to be careful about how figures are presented. The thing to bear in mind is that all our equivalence scales, even our current equivalence scales which actually make incomes comparable according to the number and age of people who are in the family, do not assume that two adults cost twice as much as one adult in a household. They all assume there are some economies of scale so that in a two-parent family the two parents do not need double what the one parent needs.

  171. That has been extremely useful. Thank you very much for your time and for the written evidence as well. It has been a considerable assistance to our inquiry and we are very grateful to you for your attendance this morning. Thank you very much.
  (Ms Middleton) May I say thank you very much for inviting me?