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Taxation: Benefits

Answer

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply. Letter from Stephen Penneck, Director General for ONS, to Baroness Massey of Darwen, dated March 2010. As Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your recent question asking what is the distribution of benefits by income decile to married couples with children under three. (HL2843). Table 1 shows the average cash benefits received by two adult households with children, by equivalised disposable income decile groups in 2007-08, the latest period for which data are available. Figures for married couples and for households with children aged less than three are unavailable. These estimates are based on data collected through the Expenditure and Food Survey, which has a sample size of approximately 6,100 households. When taking a sub-sample and then breaking down into decile groups, the new sub-samples become quite small. Therefore, caution should be exercised when drawing any conclusions from these estimates.

Table 1: Average cash benefits by decile groups of 2 adult households with children, 2007-08
	Decile groups of all households ranked by equivalised disposable income
	Bottom	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	9th	Top	All households
Average per household (£ per year)
Number of households in the population (000s)	351	386	418	501	510	578	550	546	501	484	4,786
Tota1 cash benefits ¹	5,915	5,482	5,154	4,252	3,672	3,070	2,074	2,323	2,494	2,084	3,652

"¹ Cash benefits include: retirement pension, job seeker's allowance (contribution and income based). incapacity benefit, widow’s benefits, statutory maternity pay/allowance, income support and pension credit, child benefit, housing bereft, invalid care allowance, attendance allowance, disability living allowance, war pensions/war widows’ persons, severe disablement benefit, student support, government training schemes and tax credits (child tax credit and waking tax credit).""Source: Office for National Statistics, based on data from "The effects of taxes and benefits on household income, 2007-08"." "Source: Office for National Statistics, based on data from "The effects of taxes and benefits on household income, 2007-08"."

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

2843; 718 c232-3WA

Session

2009-10

Subjects

Children Households Married people Social security benefits

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk