Families: Poverty

(asked on 18th May 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the latest Households Below Average Income release, published on 25 March, what steps they are taking to support larger families living in poverty.


This question was answered on 2nd June 2021

This Government has long championed the principle of work as the most effective way of reducing poverty. This approach is based on clear evidence about the importance of parental employment, particularly where it is full-time, in significantly reducing the risk of poverty and in improving long-term outcomes for all families and children, including families with three or more children. Such families are two and a half times less likely to be in absolute poverty (after housing costs) if all of the adults in their household are working compared to if none of the adults are working.

Our Plan for Jobs is already delivering for people of all ages right across the country and includes investing over £7 billion on new schemes such as the £2 billion Kickstart Scheme, the Restart Scheme and our Job Entry Targeted Support Scheme. We want everyone to be able to get into decent jobs and progress in work.

We are also putting more money into the pockets of the low-paid, including by increasing the national living wage and by spending an estimated £112 billion on welfare support for people of working age in 2020/2, including around £7.4 billion of Covid-related welfare policy measures.

As a Government, we have always believed that absolute poverty is a better measure of living standards than relative poverty. Relative poverty tends to fall when median income shrinks, something that is particularly relevant in the current economic circumstances.

The latest statistics for 2019/20 show that, before the pandemic, household incomes had seen the strongest annual growth for almost 20 years across the entire income distribution, with 1.3 million fewer people, including 300,000 children, in absolute poverty (after housing costs) compared with 2010. And, in the three years to 2019/20, the proportion of children in absolute poverty (after housing costs) in the North East region fell by 2 percentage points compared with the three years to 2009/10

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