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 ensure that all children have access to adequate food and warmth at weekends.

This Government is committed to supporting low-income families, and will spend over £242bn through the welfare system in 2022/23 of which £108bn on people of working age, mainly families with children.

The Government understands the pressures people are facing with the cost of living and has taken further decisive action to support people with their energy bills. The new “Energy Price Guarantee” will mean a typical UK household will now pay up to an average £2,500 a year on their energy bill for the next two years from 1 October, saving the average household in Great Britain at least £1,000 a year based on current energy prices from October. This is in addition to the over £37bn of cost-of-living support announced earlier this year which includes the £400 non-repayable discount to eligible households provided through the Energy Bills Support Scheme.

This includes the current Household Support Fund, in England, which is already providing £421m of support for the period April – September 2022; at least a third of this (£140m) will be spent on families with children. For the same period, devolved administrations have received £79 million through the Barnett formula. For the period October 2022- March 2023, we are also providing an additional £500 million to help households with the cost of essentials. This brings the total funding for this support, since October 2021, to £1.5 billion.

It remains our firm belief that work is the best route out of poverty and with 1.27 million vacancies across the UK we want to support parents to move into and to progress in work wherever possible. This approach is based on clear evidence about the importance of parental employment - particularly where it is full-time – in substantially reducing the risks of child poverty and in improving long-term outcomes for families and children.

The latest available data on in-work poverty shows that in 2019/20, children in households where all adults were in work were around six times less likely to be in absolute poverty (before housing costs) than children in a household where nobody works. In 2020/21, there were 200,000 fewer children in absolute poverty before housing costs than in 2009/10.

To help parents into work, our Plan for Jobs continues to provide broad ranging support for all jobseekers. This is on top of the support already provided by increasing the National Living Wage to £9.50 per hour, giving nearly 1.7 million families an extra £1,000 a year (on average) through our changes to the Universal Credit taper and work allowances; and the Universal Credit childcare offer which allows working parents to claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month (up to a maximum cap).