Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment his Department has made of the geographic distribution of deep material poverty across the UK.

The Department does not hold data on the number of children in deep material poverty broken down by geographical region or constituency. Estimates are available for the number of children and households that are expected to gain from the removal of two-child limit at constituency level here Poverty impacts of social security changes at Budget 2025 - GOV.UK.

As deep material poverty is impacted by a range of un-modellable factors, such as families’ broader resources, support networks and financial resilience, it is not possible to model reductions in deep material poverty in the same way as for relative low income. Instead, we have provided analysis on number of children in deep material poverty who will gain from the strategy, which can be found at the link above.

It is unacceptable that two million children are in deep material poverty, lacking the basic essentials - such as a warm home and healthy food. We estimate that 1.4 million children in deep material poverty will see an increase in household income as a result of the modelled measures in the Strategy.