Dr. Karina Doorley:

The in-kind benefits we looked at were free schoolbooks, free school meals, age-based GP visit cards, medical cards and means-tested GP visit cards, the national childcare scheme subsidies and the free preschool year. I think that is everything. The primary policy goal of those in-kind benefits is not to reduce poverty, but to improve school attendance or bring about better child outcomes or better child health. Those in-kind benefits, though, also have a measurable effect on living standards. This is why we suggested it might be worth keeping track of this aspect. In recent years, the Government has moved more towards the provision of these free services, so it is worth tracking them to see their impact. If we put a lot of money into this area, it is nice to see how it shows up in things like poverty statistics. We would suggest, therefore, that this is something that could be an alternative poverty measure. We already track after housing costs measures of poverty, so this would just be another sort of metric along those lines. I ask Mr. MaÌtre to comment on the number of children in poverty.