asked the Secretary of State for Social Services if, pursuant to his reply to the hon. Member for Wood Green on 23 October 1979, he will confirm that the number of two-parent families receiving supplementary benefit at December 1977 was 150,000; and if he will explain the discrepancy between that figure and the figure given in table 34.81 of the Social Security Statistics 1977 which indicates that there are 231,000 two-parent families on supplementary benefit.
With one exception, all the columns in table 34.81 of Social Security Statistics 1977 include some one-parent families as well as two-parent families. The exception is the twelfth column, which is confined to residual figures for the one-parent families not included elsewhere. The hon. Member will therefore appreciate that table 34.81 cannot be used in the way he suggests.The number of two-parent families receiving supplementary benefit at the end of 1977 is estimated at about 227,000. This includes, however, over 70,000 families where the head of the family was in one of three main groups: over pension age; not living in a private household; or sick or unemployed for less than three months. The remainder, about 150,000, were shown in my reply to the hon. Member on 23 October 1979.—[Vol. 967, c.
164–6.] The three groups were excluded from my reply for consistency with the information that was being given about families not receiving supplementary benefit.