Baroness Lister of Burtersett – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Lister of Burtersett on 2015-11-24.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many of those responding to the 2012 consultation Measuring Child Poverty supported the exclusion of any income measure; and whether they will name those organisations that supported the exclusion.

Lord Freud

The Government’s response to the consultation on new measures of child poverty can be found in Annex E of the attached document. The analysis of the results in 2013 recorded that two respondents to the consultation said income should not be included in a measure of child poverty.

We cannot give the names of the respondents due to Data Protection Act requirements. However, one was from an academic organisation and the other was from a frontline service.

The Government wants to focus future effort on tackling the root causes of child poverty. That is why the life chances provisions in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill will introduce new measures of worklessness and educational attainment, and why we have committed ourselves to introducing a set of non-statutory indicators including ones on family breakdown, problem debt and addiction. These measures will focus action on the areas which the evidence indicates will make a sustainable difference to children’s lives – now and in the future.