Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 15 September 2022 to Question 45171 on Poverty: Children, how the Plan for Jobs will help support the families in poverty who are already in work in Barking constituency.

The Government is committed to a sustainable, long-term approach to tackling poverty and supporting people on lower incomes. We will spend over £242bn through the welfare system in 2022/23 including £108bn on people of working age.

To support parents to progress in work, we are extending the support jobcentres provide to people in work and on low incomes to help them to increase their earnings and move into better paid quality jobs. This new in-work progression offer started to roll-out from April 2022. Once fully rolled out, we estimate that around 2.1m low-paid benefit claimants will be eligible for support. This will be provided by work coaches and focus on removing barriers to progression such as support with childcare or addressing skills gaps. This new progression offer is in addition to a change the government made last month to the Administrative Earnings Threshold in Universal Credit. By raising the threshold on 26^th September 2022, approximately 114,000 more UC claimants on the lowest incomes will benefit from regular work coach support. The Chancellor announced that we would go further and raise the threshold again from January 2023 to expand this support to approximately 120,000 more people.

As mentioned in our previous response, this is on top of the support already provided by increasing the National Living Wage to £9.50 per hour and 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

To further support parents to move into and progress in work, eligible UC claimants can claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month up to a maximum of £646.35 per month for one child and £1,108.04 per month for two or more children. This is on top of the free childcare offer in England which provides 15 hours a week of free childcare for all 3- and 4-year-olds and disadvantaged 2-year-olds, doubling for working parents of 3- and 4-year-olds to 30 hours a week.

Around 1.9 million of the most disadvantaged pupils are eligible for and claiming a free school meal, saving families around £450 per year. In addition, around 1.25 million more infants enjoy a free, healthy and nutritious meal at lunchtime as well as over 90,000 disadvantaged further education students. We are also investing £200 million a year to continue the Holiday Activities and Food Programme, which benefitted over 600,000 children last summer, and we have increased the value of the Healthy Start Scheme by a third to £4.25 a week.