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Poverty

Volume 470: debated on Thursday 24 January 2008

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (1) what baseline data his Department uses to measure material deprivation; (174832)

(2) what proportion of children in (a) workless households, (b) households where one parent is working, (c) households where both parents are working and (d) each region were living in material poverty in each quarter in the last 10 years for which records are held.

Material deprivation is one of the three indicators for measuring child poverty. The other two measures are absolute low income, which includes households with incomes below 60 per cent. of the median income held constant in real terms from a 1998-99 baseline, and relative low income, which includes households with incomes below 60 per cent. contemporary median income. The material deprivation indicator includes households with incomes below 70 per cent. of the median and a material deprivation score of 25 or more.

Information on the base lining of material deprivation can be found in ‘PSA Delivery Agreement 9: Halve the number of children in poverty by 2010-11, on the way to eradicating child poverty by 2020’; Page 24, available on the HM Treasury website.

Data on material deprivation are collated annually by the Family Resources Survey and are only available from 2004-05 onwards. Our most recent data are for 2005-06. In 2004-05, 2.2 million children in the UK were defined as poor using this combined indicator, while in 2005-06, the figure was 2.1 million children.

The proportion of children in material deprivation by economic status of household is shown in the following table. A breakdown by region is not currently available because this requires three years’ Family Resources Survey data for robust statistics.

Proportion of children in material deprivation, by economic status of household2004-052005-06All adults in work54At least one adult in work, but not all1618Workless households6057All households1716 Notes:1. Some households in the Family Resources Survey may contain more than two adults, for example a couple with children may also live with one or more of the children’s grandparents.2. Within households, pensioners are excluded from the classifications if they are not working, and are included if they are working. For those households where children live only with pensioners, the status of all adults is included in the analysis.3. The analysis includes households where someone other than the parent may be in work.4. Data for the Family Resources Survey are only collated annually and therefore a quarterly breakdown is not available.Source: Family Resources Survey

The available material deprivation figures and details of the methodology can be found in ‘PSA Delivery Agreement 9: Halve the number of children in poverty by 2010-11, on the way to eradicating child poverty by 2020’, available on the HM Treasury website.