Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent estimate her Department has made of the effect of ending the £20 uplift to universal credit on the levels of in-work poverty.

It is not possible to produce a robust estimate of the impact of removing the temporary £20 uplift on levels of in-work poverty. Projecting the impacts of policies on poverty involves projecting forward the impact of the pandemic on every household’s income which is not possible to do with confidence, not least because the latest comprehensive data on net incomes for households is from 2019-20, before the pandemic began.

With the success of the vaccine rollout and in the context of record job vacancies, we are committed to helping people get back into work and to progress in their careers. This approach is based on clear evidence about the importance of employment, particularly where it is full-time, in substantially reducing the risks of poverty. Our multi-billion-pound Plan for Jobs, which has recently been expanded by £500 million, will help people across the UK to find work and to boost their wages and prospects.

We are taking decisive action to make work pay by cutting the Universal Credit taper rate from 63p to 55p, and increasing Universal Credit work allowances by £500 per annum. This is essentially a tax cut for the lowest paid workers, worth around £2.2 billion in 2022-23 and means that 1.9m households will keep, on average, around an extra £1,000 on an annual basis. These changes are combined with a rise in the National Living Wage to £9.50 per hour.