IFS poverty report reaction live: Updates after damning think tank report on

Research by the thinktank the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that while there has been a fall in the number of workless families, the number living in poverty in households in work has risen.

These are among the findings of a new report by IFS researchers published today: Living Standards, Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom: 2015, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Robert Joyce, a Senior Research Economist at the IFS and another author of the report, said: “The government has recently emphasised worklessness as a cause of poverty”.

These figures come despite the fact that the proportion of children in workless families has dropped from 18% to 16%.

Child Poverty Action Group chief executive Alison Garnham said the report showed the “absurdity of the Government’s attempt to amend the Child Poverty Act to say there’s no such thing as working poverty”. “This makes sense, but tackling low living standards will be hard without improvements for working families too”.

The IFS examined child poverty figures released last month from the Households Below Average Income report – the Government’s official child poverty statistics.

The charity’s chairman David Holmes said: “It is deeply worrying that parents are having to cut back on food, heating and other essentials that their children need in order to develop and thrive”.

The End Child Poverty coalition are campaigning to end this by petitioning the government to put a “triple lock protection” onto the Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit. “The planned rises in the minimum wage will help many of those on the lowest hourly pay, but are smaller in overall magnitude than the benefit cuts and less tightly targeted on low-income households”.

Recent declines in income inequality would be reversed, while now static child poverty rates would begin to increase, the IFS said.

“Boosting productivity and creating more jobs which offer progression at work is vital to make work a reliable route out of poverty”.

But Labour’s Shadow Scottish Secretary, Ian Murray said: “It is an utter scandal that working families in Scotland are living in poverty”.

A Government spokesman said that the number of people in in-work poverty is 200,000 lower than at its peak in 2008/09.

In years where employment has risen earnings have also fallen, leading to a situation where while absolute child poverty has remained largely unchanged, the proportion of children in poverty living in a working family has risen from 54 per cent in 2010 to 63 per cent in 2014, the study found. And we know that the proportion of people living on low incomes is at the lowest level since the mid-1980s.