§ Mr. Richard Wainwrightasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will publish in the Official Report the numbers of working single-parent families and two-parent families, respectively, who have incomes below supplementary 332W benefit level; and if he will list them according to the number of children in each family.
§ Mr. OrmeOn the basis of information available from the Family Expenditure Survey it is estimated that at the end of 1974 (the most recent date available) there were 80,000 working (both full and part-time) families with children and having incomes below supplementary benefit level; 20,000 of these families were headed by a single parent.
The estimates are subject to considerable sampling error. It is not possible to subdivide them by family size because the sample numbers are too small to produce reliable estimates.
These figures are not strictly comparable with estimates for previous years because the self-employed were included in the 1974 Family Expenditure Survey analysis but had been excluded from all previous analyses.