Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to assess whether there has been an increase in the number of children living in poverty due to the covid-19 outbreak.

We understand that this is a difficult time for people on low incomes and we’ve taken significant action to support those affected by coronavirus, including through income protection schemes, mortgage holidays and additional support for renters. For those most in need we’ve injected more than £9 billion into the welfare system, which includes an increase to Universal Credit of up to £1,040 this financial year. These policies implemented in response to the outbreak have made a huge difference, particularly to those with low incomes.

This was shown in HMT’s recently published distributional analysis about the Impact of covid-19 on working household incomes. This publication shows that the lowest income decile of working households has seen no fall in income due to Government measures that have been put in place. This is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impact-of-covid-19-on-working-household-incomes-distributional-analysis-as-of-may-2020