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Social Security: Children

Answer

(1, 2, 5, 6)

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has published expenditure forecasts for tax credits and Child Benefit as part of their recently published Economic and Fiscal Outlook document. The relevant information relating to personal tax credits and child benefit is reproduced below. Expenditure forecasts are not produced for individual elements of tax credits.

	£ billion
	Estimate	Forecast
		Welfare cap period
	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20	2020-21
Personal tax credits	29.7	29.5	25.3	26.3	27.3	27.5	28.2
Child benefit	11.6	11.5	11.4	11.4	11.3	11.3	11.4

(3)

The Government is providing over £1 billion of funding in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to meet the costs of universal free school meals for children in reception, year 1 and year 2. Funding for later years will be considered as part of the forthcoming Spending Review.

Schools also provide free school meals for children up to the age of 18, based on their parents’ eligibility for certain benefits. This will include children in years 1 and 2. This is funded separately from within the Dedicated Schools Grant allocated to schools. It is up to schools to decide how to use their budgets and the Government does not measure spend on free school meals for this cohort.

(4)

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has published expenditure forecasts for Universal Credit as part of their recently published Economic and Fiscal Outlook document. The relevant information is reproduced below.

Expenditure forecasts are not produced by individual Universal Credit elements and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

	£ billion
		Welfare cap period
	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20	2020-21
Universal credit*	0.1	0.5	-0.2	-0.9	-1.7	-2.7	-3.1
*Universal credit actual spending for 2014-15 and 2015-16. Spending from 2016-17 onwards represents universal credit additional costs not already included against other benefits (i.e. UC payments that do not exist under current benefit structure).

(7)

The information relating to housing benefit is not readily available and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

(8)

Forecasts are not available for child care grants, for which the rate is set annually. £74 million of awards were made in the 2013/14 academic year. Information relating to student support grant for childcare for 2016/17 was published in a written statement by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on 21 July 2015. It confirmed that the maximum childcare grant payable in 2016-17, which covers 85 per cent of actual childcare costs, will be £155.24 per week for one child only and £266.15 per week for two or more children. Student support grants for childcare form just one component of the overall student grant budget.

(9)

The estimated annual costs for the Healthy start scheme for 2015/16 are £81.6 million, net of devolved administration receipts.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

HL1427

Session

2015-16

Subjects

Children Social security

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk