Clause 20
Child Poverty Bill
12:30 pm
Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
With the greatest respect, I simply do not believe what the Minister has said. The data in the Bill are based on household income. That is not the unit that claims benefit, but everybody under the same roof. The data available to HMRC are on the income of the benefit unit—the narrower definition of income. The Minister said that the data would be available at ward level. The sample used by the family resources survey is one household in 1,000, so a ward of 3,000 households would have three or four people in a sample. How can it possibly be true that data on 60 per cent. of median household income will be available, when data on household income are not collected for benefit purposes? Will the samples be big enough to have ward-level data relative to the national targets, which are on household data based on sample surveys?