Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans she has to develop a new measure of poverty in line with the recommendations of the Social Metrics Commission.

Our current priority is to improve the quality of our statutory measures before considering any further work on the Social Metric Commission’s measure specifically.

However, we are making changes to the Family Resource Survey which will benefit the Social Metrics Commission, including improved measurement of assets, adding in new questions on debt, doubling the sample size and further linking with administrative data.