Thank you very much.
It may very well be that in 20 years' time we'll look back and decide that the greatest contribution our government has made to fighting child poverty was the measures that it took, which David has just referred to, to help children from zero, as you were saying. I think our program assures staff at children's centres of the education for three- and four-year-olds. It might very well be that when you take the long view these little income supplements seem to have been the second order of importance.
However, let me draw your attention to another very important gap in what the U.K. government has done or not done. It has quite rightly looked at children from zero, but the group that has been ignored in practice and where there is no sign of any progress is late teenagers and young adults. To give you a specific example, we look particularly at measures to do with the number of 19-year-olds without what's called a level two qualification. In some sense for these purposes the precise level doesn't matter; the key point with this statistic is that about a quarter of 19-year-olds fail to reach that minimum level. That was the case a decade ago, and it is still the case.
The number of young adults who are out of work, the number of young adults who are in poverty, remains a real blot, if you like, and a gap in what's been done.
The point about those people is that when we first pledged to do something about child poverty these people were children. I don't think that's just a piece of empty rhetoric. It's very important, if we're going to say we're going to have a child poverty strategy, that we have a strategy that addresses the interests of all children, not just those at zero, even though they are very important, but all the way up.
I think the reason why we might have to wait a long time to see second-stage effects, if you like, from the government's strategy is precisely that it has not succeeded, possibly not even really tried, to come to grips with the oldest children, who then become the youngest workers. So that cycle of deprivation is in grave danger of being repeated, at least for the next generation, even if the stuff for very small children does something about it for the generation hence.