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• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Any other thoughts in terms of dealing with this bottom-end problem, and the relativity?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I just want to briefly return to this business of definitions, because some mathematicians have calculated that one of the reasons why there are so many variations in different countries about what is defined on the 60% median of people in poverty is because, quite simply, if you change your tax structure slightly, if in Britain the Government were simply to tax slightly more heavily those just above the poverty level, you could, at a stroke, to use an old phrase, remove half a million people from poverty. Now, even if we accept these definitions, and I appreciate, Kate (Kate...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

No, no, indeed, because I think that is an important point, because I think that in the mindset of the public it is confusing when you hear that x percent of people in London are technically living at or below the poverty line. I wondered if that definition would still be applicable if the median income rose considerably in London. One might feel that the definition was less, then, to do with poverty. I suppose I am asking you: are we talking about relative poverty as opposed to absolute poverty?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Would you all support the idea, then, of removing from tax, the poor, as other countries are gradually doing? We should stop taking money away from the ones we are defining as poor, which leaves them poor, and creates dependency upon the state, while still worrying about the number of and the percentage of people in poverty. Surely, we should strip out their tax, get rid of their taxation, remove it. Many of them will then immediately not be poor. Surely we would all agree with that.

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I understand that there should be a London rate, and I think there has been work done on that, on the living wage. Coming back to Kate (Green)'s point that tax credits are more significant, one of the experiences I have come across is that the bureaucracy of targeted financial programmes can be such that it actually puts off a lot of people from sitting down and putting in the applications that they are perfectly entitled to make. I don't know if you have got any thoughts on that, and how that can be cleared up so that it's a...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I think this is a fantastically important matter, and I suppose the problem I have with Dee Doocey's question is that it's very easy to try to put a number on this and say that £4 billion will solve the problem. I think we all know that out there there's a scepticism in the wider public that we are spending more on public services. I'd like more to be spent on my constituency in East London. People are asking whether we are getting sufficient value out of it, whether our services are sufficiently functional and so on, so clearly, there...

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I would be interested in the panel's view of the findings of the Joseph Rowntree Trust that said that £4-5 billion per annum is going to be needed from the Government in order to reach the targets. That just seems such an extraordinarily large figure, I would be interested to know how the panel felt about that.

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

So, are you saying that you don't think that much money is needed?

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Bishop, I wonder if you think that the function of the church ought to be more proactive? Things you have just been talking about; advice groups and playgroups and all of that kind of thing, is that that people all come to you, ought you not to be going to the people?

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Is being more effective you going out and knocking on people's doors, saying: `You are poor. You need help from us. You need our charity'?