Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what mechanisms the Government uses for recording trends in poverty at the (a) national, (b) regional and (c) local authority level.

Trends in rates of low-income nationally and regionally are published in the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) series. The latest publication is available here.

HBAI data cannot be used to produce breakdowns at local authority level as it is based on data from the Family Resources Survey (FRS), an annual survey of approximately 20,000 households across the UK. FRS sample size and coverage issues means that results broken down below the level of UK region are unlikely to be reliable. For alternative sub-regional sources, please see pages 58-59 of the HBAI Quality and Methodology report here.