Julie Hilling – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Julie Hilling on 2014-03-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Answer of 15 January 2013, Official Report, column 715W, on child poverty, what estimate his Department has made of the effect of (a) the new timetable for the implementation of universal credit and (b) changes to work allowances on the level of relative income poverty among (i) children and (ii) adults.

Esther McVey

After full roll-out, the Department’s latest analysis suggests that Universal Credit will reduce the number of individuals in relative income poverty by some 600,000; including up to 300,000 children and up to 350,000 adults (numbers do not sum due to rounding).

This figure does not take into account the expected increase in numbers of people in work as a result of universal credit, and excludes the impact of the minimum income floor for the self-employed which is designed to encourage those affected to improve their income levels and for which the behavioural response is very difficult to model.

This estimate is not affected by the timetable for the implementation of Universal Credit, and changes to the policy on uprating of work allowances make negligible difference to the impact of Universal Credit on child or adult poverty as measured by relative income.