The government has been forced into retreat after agreeing that it should continue to report lack of money as a measure of child poverty.

Ministers wanted to remove a statutory duty to publish levels of UK household income as part of the welfare reform and work bill but have now accepted, after a battle with the House of Lords, that the material deprivation measures should remain protected.

The government suffered a defeat in the Lords in January after peers pushed through an amendment forcing the government to retain four established indicators, including income, which use official statistics to track and monitor relative and absolute poverty.

Although the Commons voted to overrule the Lords vote earlier this week, the welfare reform minister, Lord Freud, on Friday published a government amendment that accepts the main thrust of the original Lords amendment proposed by the bishop of Durham.

Read full article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian here.