Source · Select Committees · Work and Pensions Committee
Recommendation 20
20
Accepted
Paragraph: 83
Past income-based targets for child poverty have helped to focus minds across Government.
Recommendation
Past income-based targets for child poverty have helped to focus minds across Government. But, like all targets, they can ‘distort’ the policy response, and some witnesses believed that this happened in the final years of the 2010/11 child poverty target as the emphasis shifted towards income transfers. To counter this risk, it is important to have a broad set of targets covering income and other policy measures. The Government must also be committed to reducing child poverty, with a clear strategy which is supported by measurable objectives and strong delivery plans.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government claimed it is already committed to tackling poverty and reports progress to Parliament through existing statutory requirements and updates. It did not commit to a new broad set of targets or a new clear strategy with measurable objectives, instead emphasizing its focus on work and existing initiatives like the Plan for Jobs.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
83
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government · verbatim extract
Accepted
The Government will continue to publish all four measures of children in low income as set out in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 in line with its statutory responsibilities. Analysts continue to review the statistical validity of the absolute poverty low income line and are intending to review the material deprivation goods and services to ensure they are still relevant. We will update the committee about this in due course. The Government develops and releases all statistics in line with the UKSA Code of Practice for Statistics and will continue to do so.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗