Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the Government has made an assessment of the effect of trends in the level of poverty on the health of children and young people throughout the UK.

The circumstances we are born in to and the conditions in which we live all have a major bearing on our health and wellbeing. The Government remains committed to tackling poverty so that we can make a lasting difference to long-term outcomes. There is clear evidence about the importance of work in tackling poverty now and in the future. Households where all adults are in work are around six times less likely to be in relative poverty than adults in a household where nobody works. The Government has lifted 400,000 people out of absolute poverty since 2010 and the number of people in employment has increased by over 3.7 million, there are around one million fewer workless households and around 667,000 fewer children in such households.