Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the (a) forecast and (b) actual figures of (i) absolute and (ii) relative child poverty were in each year since the Child Poverty Act 2010 came into force.

The Government has not produced forecasts of the number of children living in income poverty. The number of children in poverty is dependent on a number of factors which cannot be reliably predicted, including the median income.

The Government does not believe it is possible to accurately project child poverty to 2020. Poverty projections are rarely accurate. For example, IFS projections in October 2011 suggested the number of children in relative poverty would fall by 100,000 in 2010/11, whereas in fact it fell by 300,000.

Estimates of the number and proportion of children in relative and absolute low income are published in the National Statistics Households Below Average Income (HBAI) series. This information is captured using the Family Resources Survey (FRS) and has been reported since 1998/99; these estimates are available for each financial year up to 2011/12, the latest period for which estimates are available.

The estimates can be found at the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/households-below-average-income-hbai-199495-to-201112 (ISBN 978-1-78153-531-8).

Relevant estimates can be found in Table 4.1tr - 4.4tr (on pages 102-5).