Lord Bishop of Wakefield
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(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Wakefield
My Lords, further to the previous question, the Institute for Fiscal Studies report suggests that within three years, by 2015, the number of children in poverty will have increased by 400,000. What will the Government’s response be?
Lord Freud
My Lords, I was trying to answer that question just now. The IFS projections are valuable and important, but they do not absorb changes in future policy and they do not make any assumptions as to behavioural change; many of the policies that we are driving are trying to get people back into work and reduce worklessness in that way. In particular, as regards universal credit, the report does not take into account the reduction in workless families that we are expecting.