Is a jobless three-child household getting the same as a worker earning £71,000?published at 16:09 GMT
16:09 GMT
Your questions to BBC Verify
Gerry Georgieva
BBC Verify researcher
Andy from Exeter got in touch with us to ask if social media reports are true – that a salary of £71,000 per year would be needed to match what a jobless family with three children would get in benefits.
The figures come from a report by the Centre for Social Justice, external (CSJ) think tank. It calculates that, following the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, “an out-of-work family with three children receiving the average Universal Credit housing element, health benefits and PIP is projected to take home £46,000 a year by 2026/2027”.
Matching that, it says, would require a pre-tax salary of £71,000 per year.
To come up with that £46,000 figure, which seems plausible, the CSJ has used a specific example and we have tried to work out how many families this could apply to.
We asked the Department of Work and Pensions but it has not come back with these figures.
Families with children are subject to a benefit cap, which limits their benefits to around £22,000 a year outside London (and to around £25,000 in London).
But they can be exempt for a number of reasons, including claiming benefits for a health condition or a disability.
As of April, external, 189,480 households in the UK that were affected by the two child limit, had someone on health or disability benefits.
Out of those, 67,580 had a member claiming the health element of Universal Credit. We don’t know how many of these also claimed Personal Independence Payments (PIP).
And we don’t know how much these families claimed in benefits overall each year.
It’s also worth pointing out that when it comes to the example of someone earning £71,000 there are also specific circumstances attached to this.
The CSJ clarified that their estimate is for a worker who is repaying a student loan and is auto-enrolled for pension deductions.
