Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to publish a response to the Statement on the Visit to the UK by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, published on 16 November.

The Government will consider the Special Rapporteur’s findings carefully. Although it disagrees with the conclusion of this interim report, the Government has noted that the report welcomes the simplification of the benefits system brought in by Universal Credit and the recent Budget announcements to help tackle in-work poverty.

The 14 million people in poverty figure used by the Special Rapporteur was taken from the Social Metrics Commission report “A new measure of poverty for the UK”.

We welcome the work that the Social Metrics Commission has done. Measuring poverty is complex, and this report offers further insight into that complexity. We are engaging with the Social Metrics Commission, who acknowledge that further work needs to be done (particularly around data availability and quality). We will carefully consider their recommendations and the detail behind the methodology they have employed when this has been made available.

DWP publishes a range of measures that track various aspects of poverty. These include four measures for low income poverty:

The finding relating to the number of people in destitution is a misinterpretation of the key finding from a report published by the Joseph Rowntree Trust on 7 June, 2018: “Destitution in the UK, 2018”. This report found that 1.5 million people in the UK had been destitute at some point during 2017 and also noted that this was a reduction of 25 per cent compared with 2015.

Under this Government, income inequality has fallen and remains lower than in 2010; the number of children in workless households is at a record low; and there are 1 million fewer people in absolute poverty (before housing costs) compared with 2010, including 300,000 children.