Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made, or intend to make, of the report of the Resolution Foundation, Living Standards Audit 2018, published on 24 July, and its conclusion that the proportion of children in poverty has risen by 21 per cent in the five years to 2016, rather than their estimate of 11 per cent.

Benefit under-reporting in household surveys is a well-known, long standing issue. To date it has not been possible to accurately resolve this. The Resolution Foundation’s report published on 24 July attempts to correct this issue. However, they do not have accurate information on which households are under-reporting. Consequently, they use a series of assumptions to select a number of households in the survey, allocating them additional income from benefits. This means the conclusions in the report will be sensitive to the households selected; different assumptions will give different results.

DWP is currently working towards a more accurate solution to correct this issue, whereby survey records are combined with administrative data to improve the quality of the survey data. Making this correction is likely to reduce the number of individuals classed as being in low income.