No, I am going to make some progress.
In-work poverty has risen to record levels: 8 million people, including 2.7 million children, are in poverty, despite being in a working family, and 67% of working-age adults and children in poverty in the UK are in working households. Many people are stuck in a low pay, no pay cycle, where they may pass from employed to unemployed and back again several times in the course of a year.
A study of in-work poverty published by researchers at Cardiff University found that
“those in working poverty are three times more likely to become workless than people living in non-poor working households.”
It also found that not everyone who finds work progresses to better paid employment. The reports states that
“one quarter of those families where somebody finds work, exit worklessness only to enter in-work poverty. Lone parents are over-represented in this group, as are families with three or more children.”'.
I recommend the report to the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean).
The cumulative impact assessment by the Equality and Human Rights Commission published last week, which several Members have rightly referenced, states that the measure that has the most impact on households on low income is the four-year benefits freeze introduced in April 2016. When the benefits freeze began in April 2016, inflation was 0.3%. Despite a fall in inflation last month, it is still at 2.7%, and food prices went up by well over 3% in February compared with the year before. So it is little wonder that the chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority has warned of increasing household debt built up simply by trying to cover basic household bills.
The Resolution Foundation estimates that by 2019 a lone parent in work with one child will lose £420 a year as a direct result of the freeze alone, and a couple with a single earner and two children will lose £570 a year. If the Chancellor was justified in his claims in his spring statement for improvements in the public finances, will the Government abandon the benefits freeze that is pushing households into poverty?
Housing benefit was first cut in 2011 and is also one of the benefits now frozen by the Act, but private sector rents have continued to rise rapidly. Between 2011 and 2018,
private rents in the UK increased by more than 15%—and by more than 12% even if London is excluded. The Act also severely cut the levels of the benefit cap so that it is now hitting the whole of the country, and the cap in practice operates through a cut in housing benefit. The benefit cap is supposedly designed to incentivise work by exempting people who start claiming working tax credits. However, 45,000 households that had their housing benefit capped in November 2017 were single-parent families, and 35,000—