Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of legally-binding child poverty reduction targets on cross-departmental coordination and prioritisation of resources.

Our Child Poverty Strategy fulfils our commitment to reducing poverty this Parliament and sets out our ambition to fundamentally fix the structural drivers of child poverty as part of a long-term, 10-year strategy for lasting change. From the beginning of our time in government we have acted on child poverty including through increasing the minimum wage, the Fair Repayment Rate for deductions from Universal Credit, and the removal of the two child limit from April 2026.

In addition to the existing statutory duty on Government to publish poverty statistics annually, we will be monitoring progress using two complementary headline metrics. These will measure overall child poverty using our leading measure of relative low income and our new measure of deep material poverty that looks at families’ ability to afford essentials as well as their income and housing costs.

The Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, published alongside the Strategy, sets out our plans to track progress against these metrics as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, accountability, and continued learning. There will continue to be a dedicated team in government that, with Ministerial oversight, will work across government, the public and private sectors and civil society as we develop milestones and plans for delivering, monitoring and evaluating our strategy.

We will publish a baseline report next summer which will set out the latest statistics and evidence, with annual reporting thereafter to monitor and evaluate progress.