Poverty: Children

(asked on 2nd September 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to tackle child poverty in Barking constituency.


Answered by
David Rutley Portrait
David Rutley
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 15th September 2022

No specific assessment has been made relating to Barking constituency. However, the latest statistics on the number and proportion of children who are in low income families by local area, covering the seven years, 2014/15 to 2020/21, can be found in the annual publication: Children in low income families: local area statistics 2014 to 2021 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-in-low-income-families-local-area-statistics-2014-to-2021

This Government is committed to reducing child poverty and supporting low-income families, and believes work is the best route out of poverty.  While we keep all our policies under continuous review, our clear priority with 1.27 million vacancies across the UK is to support parents to move into and to progress in work wherever possible. This approach is based on clear evidence about the importance of parental employment - particularly where it is full-time – in substantially reducing the risks of child poverty and in improving long-term outcomes for families and children.

The latest available data on in-work poverty shows that in 2019/20, children in households where all adults were in work were around six times less likely to be in absolute poverty (before housing costs) than children in a household where nobody works. In 2020/21, there were 200,000 fewer children in absolute poverty before housing costs than in 2009/10.

To help parents into work, our Plan for Jobs continues to provide broad ranging support for all jobseekers with our Sector Based Work Academy Programmes (SWAP), Job Entry Targeted Support and Restart scheme. Through a staged roll-out, which started in April 2022, around 2.1m low-paid benefit claimants will be eligible for extended support through our Jobcentres to progress into higher-paid work. This is on top of the support already provided by increasing the National Living Wage to £9.50 per hour, giving nearly 1.7 million families an extra £1,000 a year (on average) through our changes to the Universal Credit taper and work allowances; and the Universal Credit childcare offer which allows working parents to claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month (up to a maximum cap).

In recent years, we have helped hundreds of thousands of Universal Credit claimants to keep more of their benefit income by reducing the standard deductions cap from 40% to 30% of the Standard Allowance in October 2019, and again, to 25% in April 2021. From 1st April 2022, a temporary change also means that for 12 months, only benefit claimants themselves can ask DWP to pay their energy bills (on going consumption) directly from their benefit or alter an existing arrangement. This ensures claimants are fully empowered to make decisions about how significant amounts of their benefit are spent.

The government understands the pressures people are facing with the cost of living and has taken further decisive action to support people with their energy bills. The new “Energy Price Guarantee” will mean a typical UK household will now pay up to an average £2,500 a year on their energy bill for the next two years from 1 October, saving the average household in Great Britain at least £1,000 from October. This is in addition to the over £37bn of cost-of-living support announced earlier this year which includes the £400 non-repayable discount to eligible households provided through the Energy Bills Support Scheme.

This includes an additional £500 million to help households with the cost of essentials, on top of what has already been provided since October 2021, bringing the total funding for this support to £1.5 billion. In England, the current Household Support Fund is already providing £421m of support for the period 1 April – 30 September 2022, at least a third (£140m) will be spent on families with children. London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Council has been allocated £2,162,051.52.

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