Tom Wernham, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC using administrative records to “correct benefit amounts is going to be a big improvement to the quality of the data underpinning the UK’s official income and poverty statistics, and we definitely welcome that”.
“This is especially important given the Scottish government and now UK government are targeting measures of child poverty based on this data, and benefits are a key source of income for this group,” Wernham said.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank said it expects the new survey will show there were fewer people in relative low income than previously thought.
“Many of the children the government claims will move out of poverty live in households who were just below the relative low-income line,” said Benjamin Gregg, the head of welfare research at the think tank.
“The forthcoming changes to the FRS will likely show many of these children were already not in relative low-income.”
Gregg said the revision “shows the shortcomings of relying on income-based measures of poverty”.
He said the CSJ preferred the material deprivation statistic, which measures whether people lack what are commonly held to be necessities.
A report by the think tank, external found that a child growing up in a workless household was four times more likely to be materially deprived than in a working household.
“The government should ensure that it targets policies and resources towards tackling the root causes of poverty, rather than relying on flawed relative income measures,” Gregg said.
A DWP spokesperson said: “Every child deserves the best start in life and by scrapping the two-child limit as part of our child poverty strategy we will lift 550,000 children out of poverty by the end of this parliament.
“We’re also working to drive down living costs and prevent families from falling into poverty in the first place, increasing the national living wage, cutting an average £150 from household energy bills and creating a genuine safety net for households through the £1bn multi-year Crisis and Resilience fund.”