Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many households are in receipt of (a) child tax credit, (b) working tax credit and (c) both those tax credits by income decile.

The number of individuals in receipt of tax credits is based on Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data sourced from the 2015-16 Family Resources Survey (FRS). In the FRS tax credit receipt is based on self-assessment and therefore may be subject to misreporting, and the FRS is known to undercount receipt of certain benefits. The numbers in the table have been corrected for the undercount. They have been produced by scaling the proportion in each decile from HBAI to the overall number of families in receipt of child tax credit, working tax credit and both child tax credit and working tax credit, from administrative data. The tax credit administrative data is available at the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-and-working-tax-credits-statistics-finalised-annual-awards-2015-to-2016

The calculation of income deciles uses disposable household income, adjusted using modified OECD equivalisation factors for household size and composition. All estimates are based on survey data and are therefore subject to a degree of uncertainty. Small differences should be treated with caution as these will be affected by sampling error and variability in non-response. Numbers of individuals have been rounded to the nearest hundred thousand. Numbers that round to less than one hundred thousand have been suppressed (“-“).