Children: Poverty

(asked on 9th June 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the levels of child poverty in (a) Scotland and (b) East Renfrewshire constituency.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 17th June 2021

This Government is wholly committed to tackling poverty. Throughout the pandemic, our priority has been to support the most vulnerable including through spending an additional £7.4billion to strengthen the welfare system, taking our total expenditure on welfare support for people of working age to an estimated £112 billion in 2020/21.

National Statistics on the number and percentage of children in low income are published annually in the “Households Below Average Income” publication. Data for East Renfrewshire constituency is unavailable due to insufficient sample size.

Latest statistics for the levels of children who are in low income in Scotland, covering 2019/20, can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2020 in data table 4.16ts (relative low income, before and after housing costs) and in data table 4.22ts (absolute low income, before and after housing costs).

In the three years to 2019/20, the absolute child poverty rate, before housing costs, in Scotland was 17%, down 3 percentage points since the three years to 2009/10.

The Department now publishes supplementary official statistics on the number of children in low income families at constituency level. Children in Low Income Families data is published annually. The latest figures on the number of children who are in low income in East Renfrewshire constituency, covering 2019/20, can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-in-low-income-families-local-area-statistics-2014-to-2020/children-in-low-income-families-local-area-statistics-fye-2015-to-fye-2020.

Due to methodological differences, the figures in these two publications are not comparable.

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