Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment his Department has made of the effect of the benefit freeze on trends in the level of child poverty.

This Government is committed to building a country that works for everyone. That is why our forthcoming Green Paper will identify and address the root causes of child poverty, building on the new statutory indicators of parental worklessness and children’s educational attainment set out in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016.

We know that work is the best route out of poverty. The Government’s welfare reforms – including the measures in that Act to increase work incentives and reduce welfare dependency – are working. We now have the lowest rate of unemployment in over a decade, and the lowest number of workless households since records began. 557,000 fewer children are now living in workless households than in 2010. There is clear evidence that good quality work is linked to better physical and mental health and improved wellbeing, and better parental health is associated with better outcomes for children.

The Government is also increasing the National Living Wage to £9 an hour by 2020, helping give lower earners their fastest pay rise in 20 years.