Asked by: David Baines (Labour - St Helens North)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to help tackle child poverty in St Helens North constituency.
Answered by Alison McGovern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
In St Helens North, there were 6,670 children in UC households in November 2024. There are 7,634 pupils (28.3%) known to be eligible for free school meals in St Helens. In 2023/24, there were 7,096 (33.8%) children in in relative low income after housing costs. Delivering our manifesto commitment to tackle child poverty is a priority for this Government. The Child Poverty Taskforce is progressing work to publish the Child Poverty Strategy in autumn that will deliver fully funded measures to tackle the structural and root causes of child poverty, including children in the St Helens North constituency.
The Strategy will look at levers across four key themes of increasing incomes, reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience; and better local support especially in the early years. This will build on the reform plans underway across government and work underway in Devolved Governments.
As a significant downpayment ahead of Strategy publication, we have already taken substantive action across major drivers of child poverty through Spending Review 2025. This includes an expansion of Free School Meals that will lift 100,000 children out of poverty by the end of the parliament, establishing a long-term Crisis and Resilience Fund supported by £1 billion a year (including Barnett impact), investing in local family support services, and extending the £3 bus fare cap. We also announced the biggest boost to social and affordable housing investment in a generation and £13.2 billion including Barnett impact across the Parliament for the Warm Homes Plan.
Our commitments at the 2025 Spending Review come on top of the existing action we have taken which includes expanding free breakfast clubs, capping the number of branded school uniform items children are expected to wear, increasing the national minimum wage for those on the lowest incomes and supporting 700,000 of the poorest families by introducing a Fair Repayment Rate on Universal Credit deductions.
Asked by: David Baines (Labour - St Helens North)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proportion of Personal Independence Payment recipients are in work in (a) St Helens North constituency, (b) St Helens Local Authority, (c) the Liverpool City Region and (d) nationally.
Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The proportion of working age Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants who are in work can be found in the table below.
Table 1: Working age Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants who are in work
| Percentage in work |
St Helens North Parliamentary Constituency | 20% |
St Helens Local Authority | 20% |
Liverpool City Region | 19% |
England and Wales | 20% |
Notes:
Asked by: David Baines (Labour - St Helens North)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to her Department’s press release entitled You could get Pension Credit – Week of Action to drive take up, published on 1 September 2024, whether she has made an assessment of the impact of that campaign on trends in the level of applications for Pension Credit.
Answered by Emma Reynolds - Economic Secretary (HM Treasury)
The department has secured funding to support increased staffing and fund our communications strategy to support our programme of activity to drive up Pension Credit claims. The latest data available shows we have received around 38,500 Pension Credit claims in the 5 weeks since the announcement on 29th July (which is up to and including w/c 26th August).
This represents a 115% increase in Pension Credit claims received by the Department in the past 5 weeks compared to the 5 weeks before.
Asked by: David Baines (Labour - St Helens North)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what data her Department holds on the number and proportion of children living in poverty in St Helens North constituency in (a) 2024 and (b) 2010.
Answered by Alison McGovern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Statistics on the number of Children living in absolute and relative poverty per constituency are published annually in the “Children in low income families: local area statistics” publication and can be found in tabs “6_Absolute_ParlC” and “5_Relative_ParlC” at Children in low income families: local area statistics 2014 to 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). The latest statistics published on 21 March 2024 cover the years 2014/15 to 2022/23. Figures are not available prior to 2014/15 and are produced on a before housing costs basis only.