Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of the benefit freeze on levels of persistent poverty in the UK.

The Department has made no assessment of the impact of the benefit freeze on levels of persistent poverty.

Wider social and economic factors, including employment effects, make it challenging to isolate, with any certainty, the impacts of the benefit freeze in comparison to a counterfactual in which benefit rates were not frozen.

Full analysis of persistent low income, across the whole population and various demographic subgroups, is available in Income Dynamics (published in March 2017). The latest data covers the time period 2010 to 2015.

The government is committed to measuring the percentage of children in persistent low income, as set out in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016.