Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of children in (a) relative and (b) absolute poverty in each region of the UK in the next three years.

The Government does not produce forecasts of the number of children living in income poverty either locally or nationally. The number of children in poverty is dependent on a number of factors which cannot be reliably predicted.

This Government does not believe it is possible to accurately project child poverty. We know that 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.