Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Buscombe on 28 November (HL3456), how they monitor the accumulated impact of welfare benefit changes on different groups; and what assessment they have made of that impact.

Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) undertake a distributional analysis, at each fiscal event, to assess the accumulated impact of tax, welfare and public spending changes on household incomes. The latest analysis was published to accompany Autumn Budget 2017.

In terms of monitoring the impacts on different groups, the Department publishes annual estimates of households living in low income in the Households Below Average Incomes (HBAI) publication. These statistics set out long run trends in the risks of different groups living in low income households. The latest estimates are to 2015/16 and 2016/17 results have been pre-announced to be published in March 2018.