Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will hold discussions with Cabinet colleagues on (a) methods to identify in schools families experiencing food poverty and (b) provide additional welfare support to those families in those circumstances.

We recognise the importance of understanding who is experiencing food poverty. That is why we introduced a set of questions into the Family Resources Survey (FRS) to measure and track foodbank usage from April 2021. The first results of these questions are due to be published in March 2023 subject to usual quality assurance.

The Government spends approximately £1 billion annually on Free School Meals (FSM) and remains committed to supporting children, including through the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme and school breakfast clubs. The Government provides funding of over £200 million a year for HAF, which provides healthy meals and holiday club places to children from low-income families. The Government is allocating £24 million over two years for the national school breakfast programme, which benefits over 2,000 schools across the country. We want to make sure as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming their free school meals. To support this, we provide an Eligibility Checking System (ECS) to make it as quick and straightforward as possible for schools and local authorities to determine eligibility.

This Government is committed to a sustainable, long-term approach to tackling poverty and supporting people on lower incomes in this country. In 2022/23 we will spend £245 billion through the welfare system in Great Britain including £111 billion on people of working age. In 2023/24, subject to parliamentary approval, we are uprating all benefit rates and State Pensions by 10.1%, and in order to increase the number of households who can benefit from these uprating decisions, the benefit cap levels are also increasing by the same amount.

With over 1.16 million vacancies across the UK, our focus is firmly on supporting people into and to progress in work. Our approach is based on clear evidence about the importance of employment, particularly where it is full-time, in substantially reducing the risk of poverty. The latest available data on in-work poverty also shows that in 2019/20, there was only a 3% chance of children being in poverty (absolute, before housing costs) where both parents worked full-time compared with 42% where one or more parents in a couple was in part-time work.