Poverty: Children
(asked on 18th October 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the report by the North East Child Poverty Commission entitled Getting the building blocks wrong: Early childhood poverty in the North East, published in September 2022, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his policies of the conclusions on the risk of poverty faced by (a) families where someone has a disability, (b) lone parent families, (c) families with parents aged under 25 and (d) families in rented homes.
Projecting the impacts of policies on income poverty is very difficult to do accurately – as poverty is dependent on changes for every type of income for the whole population. It is very difficult to isolate the specific impact of one policy and how many people might be moving slightly above or below a threshold that changes over time. Many policies will lead to changes in behaviour (e.g. being incentivised into employment) which can also be very difficult to predict.
National Statistics on the number and percentage of people in poverty are published annually in the “Households Below Average Income” publication. Statistics, covering up until 2019/20, can be found here:
The Government is committed to reducing child poverty and supporting low-income families. In 2022/23 we will spend over £242 billion through the welfare system in Great Britain including £108 billion on people of working age.
This is in addition to the support we have 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, the government provides a range of childcare offers. For more information on what childcare support may be available, we encourage parents to us the helpful Childcare Choices website.