§ Mr. Croninasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will give details of the recent report published by his Department on one-parent and two-parent families.
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§ Sir K. JosephIn May this year my Department published a report in its Statistical and Research Report series called "Families receiving supplementary benefit", which compared the circumstances of some fatherless families and families of the long-term sick and unemployed. I regret that my reference to this report in my answer to a supplementary question by the hon. Member on 11th July last may have misled since this report was necessarily based on a study of matched and therefore not representative samples of families receiving supplementary benefit. While it makes some helpful comparisons between the different kinds of families studied it is not possible to draw conclusions from it about the circumstances of one and two-parent families in general.—[Vol. 840, c. 1389–90.]