Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of children in poverty in (a) Glasgow North West constituency, (b) Glasgow, (c) Scotland and (d) the UK in each year until 2020.

The Government does not produce forecasts of the number of children living in income poverty either locally or nationally. The number of children in poverty is dependent on a number of factors which cannot be reliably predicted, including the median income.

The Government does not believe it is possible to accurately project child poverty to 2020. Poverty projections are rarely accurate. For example, IFS projections in October 2011 suggested the number of children in relative poverty would fall by 100,000 in 2010/11, whereas in fact it fell by 300,000.