Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the number of households with a single-earner income of over £50,000 in (a) North East Hampshire constituency and (b) the UK; and if he will make it his policy to support those households through the tax system.

The number of households with a single-earner income of over £50,000 is based on Department for Work and Pensions analysis of Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data sourced from the 2017-18 Family Resources Survey (FRS).

The survey sample sizes are too small to produce robust estimates at local authority or constituency level. The Department for Work and Pensions estimate that in the UK in 2017-18 there were 2.7m households with one person earning over £50,000 per year from employment (either as an employee or self-employed). Of these, 700,000 households contained only one person in employment.

The Government has made substantial increases to the personal allowance and higher rate threshold in recent years. In April 2019, the Government increased the personal allowance to £12,500 and the higher rate threshold to £50,000. This ensured that nearly one million fewer people pay the higher rate of tax compared to 2015-16 and that a typical higher rate taxpayer pays over £1,800 less income tax than in 2010-11.