REMOVING the two-child cap on benefits would "lift a lot of children out of poverty” and Labour "could have" scrapped it, a UK Government minister has admitted.
However, Scottish Labour’s Michael Shanks defended his government’s decision to keep the two-child limit in place for economic reasons as he came under fire from the SNP, Tory, and LibDem MPs.
Shanks had been appearing alongside the Tories’ Andrew Bowie, SNP’s Kirsty Blackman, and LibDems’ Christine Jardine at an Iain Dale All Talk event at the Edinburgh Fringe when he found himself criticised from both the left and right for failing to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
The discussion on the issue was the most heated of the event and took place after Shanks insisted that people may not see the “change” Labour pledged in the General Election for 10 years.
“We need to move to a place where we accept that government needs to take long-term decisions and that you can't get quick wins on everything,” Shanks said.
“There is a need now to say, actually, we're going to start some projects, whether it's in house building or in energy, in my brief, that might not see the benefits for 10 years.”
Asked to name some concrete changes Labour could, or had, made rapidly, Shanks pointed to the reversal of a de-facto ban on onshore wind farms in England, the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme, and Labour’s “New Deal for Working People”.
LibDem MP Jardine won applause after interjecting to say: “You could have made a massive change by lifting the two-child cap on benefits.”
“We could have,” Shanks conceded, before going on: “But your party and the SNP haven't said where £3.5 billion a year is going to come from.”
The figures Shanks quoted is the upper estimate from projections of how much scrapping the two-child cap – which prevents the majority of people from claiming benefits for their third or subsequent children – could cost each year.
However, Jardine responded: “Yes, we did, actually [say where the money would come from]. We did.
“We talked about reforming capital gains tax so that it's not a flat system. Make it much more like income tax, people at the top pay more. But it's not just about where you find the money. it's about saying you'll do it.
“You come into government and say you want to make change. One of the biggest changes in this country is the poverty that we're seeing, the increase in child poverty in this country. Why didn't you do the one thing that we all said could make a big difference?”
She added: “Two minutes ago you said you have to prove that you're going to be as good as your word. That was your word, and you didn't do it.”
Responding, Shanks pointed to Labour’s Child Poverty Strategy, which is being jointly led by the Work and Pensions Secretary and the Education Secretary.
He went on: “It's not just the two-child cap. Yes, it would lift a lot of children out of poverty, but there are a lot more children that are in poverty through other means as well.
“This idea that one change in the benefit system is going to fix child poverty is naive.”
Bowie, whose Conservative Party brought in the two-child cap, also criticised Shanks, accusing Labour of saying one thing in opposition and another in power.
“Just a word of warning to Michael,” the former Tory minister said. “If you spend five years, as Labour did, campaigning and voting against the two-child cap, as an example, then come into government with the opportunity to change a policy that you spent five years opposing us on, and then do not change that, that's when disillusion sets in in the minds of the general public.
“In the same way we said quite clearly we were going to stop the boats, and then didn't stop the boats.
“People want politicians to do what they say. Unfortunately already we're seeing, within four or five weeks, Labour not delivering on things that they promised that they would do over the past five years.”
Keir Starmer’s Labour have insisted they will only consider lifting the two-child cap on benefits when they can afford to do so, without giving any firm timeframe.
However, before taking power, Labour figures including Starmer and now-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner had attacked the cap, with Rayner calling it “obscene and inhumane”.
