Human Resources committee  What I'm saying to you is that I don't think in the U.K. we ever measure the quality end of it in terms of that.

Human Resources committee  We measure the quality end of it in terms of health and safety or the physical protection of the child. The second point I'd make on your point about women in the workforce is that, absolutely, that development is the same everywhere across the western world. I don't think that

Human Resources committee  Yes, we do. It has developed in the U.K. In fact, there's another session ahead on this one, but it's reasonably extensive now. I don't think it's quite as extensive in general terms as what you have here, but it's much more extensive than it was 10 years ago and takes this into

Human Resources committee  Yes. Plus, you know, you can't always--

Human Resources committee  One of the areas we suggested, for example, was to look at what we call our universal child benefit. I don't know if you have that here. Everyone who has a child gets so much money per child.

Human Resources committee  That's universal. It doesn't matter what your income is. One of the things we suggested was that you might want to sweep some of that forward and give somebody in the first two years the option of taking that money in the first two years and not looking to take it later on. In

Human Resources committee  I'll send all of these things.

Human Resources committee  Well, I come back to the point I made earlier, that it all starts before the child is born. It starts with the stability of family life around that child and that mother. So that mother arrives at that point of the birth in a stable, unstressed relationship. If you look at it, mo

Human Resources committee  It's related to what I've said, in a sense, which is that the building of networks in community is what essentially helps support. You start, obviously, with families. Family is the first community any child is going to have experience with, so the more stable that community for

Human Resources committee  The figure we came up with in here is drawn not just from the U.K. but pretty much from around the world. Almost every figure we show is that it appears there is a fundamental difference between cohabitation, particularly when children are involved, and marriage. We have high d

Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  This brings me back to the point I've just made, which is on early intervention. This encompasses all of that sort of work. There are some interesting things about child care that we discovered. Again, if you have a chance to really go through this stuff you'll see there's a sec

Human Resources committee  That's very brave of you.

Human Resources committee  I would first of all say that the problem we have as elected individuals in government—I don't know, and I assume it must be the same over here—is that we have very short time scales. The fact is that in the U.K. a government is elected for up to five years, but every year we hav

Human Resources committee  Obviously the most important thing about resolving poverty is access to work. There is no question about this. If ultimately the family is to be free of the state of poverty, work is critical. There must be work. One of the points I make throughout is that we should stop talking