Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of ensuring that data held by her Department that would qualify a person's child for free school meals also captures (a) how many children that person is the main carer of and b) the school year of each qualifying child.
Answered by Will Quince
The Department provides colleagues at the Department for Education (DfE) projections of the Universal Credit caseload, split by the earnings of the household and number of children in each household by age. This enables DfE to estimate how many households will be eligible for Free School Meals in the future.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether the Child Maintenance Service holds data on the number of active cases managed by that service by Parliamentary constituency.
Answered by Mims Davies - Shadow Minister (Women)
Figures on number of active cases managed by the Child Maintenance Service broken down by Parliamentary constituency are intended for future publication.
The Department currently publishes figures which show geographical breakdowns to Local Authority level of the main figures from the Child Maintenance Service statistics to June 2019.
These can be found here:
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 18 September 2017 to Question 10205, whether the choice of the 40th percentile as a cut off point for comparing workless families with families with work on low incomes was based on prior research on (a) similarities in equivalised total household net income and (b) other similarities between these groups.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
By comparing children in workless families to children in working families in the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution (where income is equivalised total household net income), we can compare the risk of disadvantage and poorer outcomes for children who live in workless families to those who live in families in the lower end of the income distribution and are in work. The 40th percentile was selected to give a reasonable approximation of incomes between the two groups. While the incomes will not be exactly the same across the groups, the threshold provides a pragmatic approach to offering more insight into disadvantage and outcomes than an in work and out of work comparison only.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 18 September 2017 to Question 10204, what proportion of children with (a) at least one parent reporting having a longstanding limiting illness or disability, (b) at least one parent reporting having poor mental health, (c) the household reports signs of problem debt and (d) all parents having low or no qualifications are in (i) workless families, (ii) families with work from the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution and (iii) families with work from the top 60 per cent of the income distribution.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The data is presented below:
| Workless family | Working family (bottom 40% of the income distribution) | Working family (top 60% of the income distribution) | Total |
At least one parent has a longstanding limiting illness and/or disability | 27% | 36% | 37% | 100% |
At least one parent has poor mental health | 21% | 38% | 41% | 100% |
The household reports signs of problem debt | 21% | 50% | 29% | 100% |
Parents with low or no qualifications | 52% | 36% | 13% | 100% |
Notes: The data above is based on the proportion of children with selected parental disadvantages by work status of parents. Income refers to equivalised total household net income.
Source: Wave F of the Understanding Society Survey, 2014-2015, using a cross-sectional sample.
The analysis in the “Improving lives: helping workless families analysis and research pack” showed 13% of children were in workless families in 2014-2015. The vast majority of children are in families that are in work, therefore the proportion of children with a selected parental disadvantage that are in working families is likely to be higher. This is why the Improving lives: helping workless families analysis compared the risk of parental disadvantages and poorer outcomes in workless families compared to children in working families, including children in a working family in the bottom 40% of the income distribution and children in a working family in the top 60% of the income distribution. This showed that the risk of experiencing these disadvantages is higher in workless families than in working families, including lower-income working families.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to his Department's publication entitled Improving lives: helping workless families analysis and research pack, published in April 2017, for what reason workless families are compared to families with work from the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution in that publication.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The “Improving lives: helping workless families analysis and research pack”, compares workless families to working families from the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution, because this represents a more useful comparison than comparing to all working families.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to his Department's publication entitled Improving lives: helping workless families analysis and research pack, published in April 2017, what proportion of families experiencing each Children and Young People's Outcome Indicator from 2 to 9 were included in the (a) workless family, (b) working family in the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution and (c) working family in the top 60 per cent of the income distribution category.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The publication “Improving lives: helping workless families: analysis and research pack” presents analysis on worklessness, other associated disadvantages and how they impact on children’s outcomes. The publication includes analysis of nine indicators and the most interesting and useful breakdowns.
It is not possible to produce the majority of the breakdowns requested because of the different data sources, definitions and availability of data.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if the Government will make an assessment of the findings of the London School of Economics Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion report, Does Money Affect Children's Outcome: An Update, published in July 2017.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
Making a meaningful difference to the lives of disadvantaged children requires an approach that goes beyond the safety net of the welfare state to tackle the root causes of child poverty and disadvantage. Work is key to alleviating poverty; children in workless households are five times more likely to be in poverty than those in households where all adults were working. And new analysis carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions shows that children living in workless families are significantly more disadvantaged, and achieve poorer outcomes than other children including those in lower-income working families. This Government’s policies to support and encourage work mean that there are 608,000 fewer children in workless households compared with 2010. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families, published on 4 April, set out a framework for a continued focus on improving children’s outcomes, now and in the future.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to page 71 of the Social Mobility Commission's report, Time for Change: an assessment of government policies on social mobility 1997-2017, published on 28 June 2017, what assessment he has made of the effect of welfare reforms and policies encouraging labour market flexibility on (a) rates of labour force participation, (b) job quality, (c) productivity and (d) worker progression.
Answered by Damian Hinds
The Department has made no formal assessment of Labour Market Impacts in direct relation to the Social Mobility Report.
We do publish Impact assessments of welfare policies which include an assessment of their labour market impact. These can be found on the link below.
Asked by: Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to page 16 of the report, UK Poverty: Causes and Solutions, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 6 September 2016, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of the recommendation to measure and monitor destitution directly through surveys.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
We are aware of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s September 2016 report ‘UK Poverty, Causes, Costs and Solution’ which aimed to set out a long-term strategy for a UK free of poverty.
The merits of the recommendation in this report to measure and monitor destitution directly through repeated surveys have been considered with the JRF. It is acknowledged that individuals and families living in non-private households, communal establishments and the homeless are not well captured on surveys currently used to measure household income and poverty. The ONS is currently commissioning, jointly with JRF, a research project to investigate the feasibility of including individuals and families not living in private households (who are currently not covered by traditional household surveys) in estimates of personal well-being, poverty and destitution. We will be interested in the results of this report when it is published (due in early 2018).
One of the key benefits of repeating a survey is to build a meaningful time series from the data, with the changes seen over time helping government to understand how policies impact on individuals and families. However, given the difficulty in generating a robust sampling frame for this group, we may not be sure that apparent movements in the destitution measure over time are genuine, rather than driven by random changes in the sample we happen to include between years.