Poverty: Children

(asked on 23rd January 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effect of the two-child limit on child poverty in (a) each Welsh local authority and (b) each Welsh parliamentary constituency.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 28th January 2020

National Statistics on the percentage of children in low income households are published annually in the “Households Below Average Income” publication and the latest year for which information is available is 2017/18. As the two-child limit policy was introduced in April 2017 there is insufficient data to assess any impacts of the policy on low income. Also estimates for the percentage of children in low income households are not available at local authority or parliamentary constituency level in this publication because the survey sample sizes are too small to support the production of robust estimates at this geography. For these two reasons it is not possible to evaluate the impacts of specific policies on poverty for these areas.

Data relating to the operation of the policy in Wales can be found in the latest annual statistics release which was published on 31 July 2019 and covers the period up to 2 April 2019. This data can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-tax-credit-and-universal-credit-claimants-statistics-related-to-the-policy-to-provide-support-for-a-maximum-of-2-children-april-2019

We have committed to further annual releases.

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