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 impact of removing the £20 uplift to the standard allowance of universal credit on household budgets in Newport West constituency.

No such assessments have been made of household budgets in Newport West constituency.

It is not possible to produce a robust estimate of the impact of removing the temporary £20 uplift on household budgets. 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.

This Government is wholly committed to supporting those on low incomes, and continues to do so through many measures, including by spending over £110 billion on welfare support for people of working age in 2021/22.

With the success of the vaccine rollout and record job vacancies, our focus now is on continuing to support people into and to progress in work. 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.

Universal Credit recipients in work can now benefit from a reduction in the Universal Credit taper rate from 63% to 55%, and an increase in the work allowance by £500 per year meaning that working households will be able to keep substantially more of what they earn. These measures effectively represent a tax cut, worth around £2.2bn a year in 2022-23, for the lowest paid in society and will benefit almost two million of the lowest paid workers by £1000 a year on average. We are also increasing the National Living Wage by 6.6% to £9.50 an hour from April 2022.

We recognise that some people may require extra support over the winter, which is why vulnerable households across the country will now be able to access a new £500 million support fund to help them with essentials. The Barnett Formula will apply in the usual way, with the Welsh Government receiving £25m. We understand that the Welsh Government is releasing extra funding from its reserves to target support towards lower income households, providing immediate support for people facing rising living costs this winter.