Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment the Child Poverty Taskforce has made of the potential benefits of statutory child poverty reduction targets.

The Child Poverty Taskforce continues its urgent work to publish the Child Poverty Strategy and is exploring all available levers across government to deliver an enduring reduction in child poverty in this parliament, as part of a 10-year Strategy for lasting change.

As set out in the publication of 23 October ‘Tackling Child Poverty: Developing our Strategy’, the Taskforce is exploring a range of metrics and will make decisions alongside the publication of the strategy. This work will be guided by the leading, and internationally recognised, measure of poverty - Relative Poverty After Housing Costs (the proportion of families with below 60% of the median income after housing costs are deducted).

Our metrics must also reflect the experience of poverty in households across the UK and the urgent need to focus on those children experiencing the most severe and acute forms of poverty. The Taskforce will consider how best to measure this as the strategy develops, including through our work on the material deprivation measure following the recent review of the material deprivation survey questions carried out by the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science.