Once Labour set up a child poverty taskforce, it was predestined that the two-child benefit limit would be abolished. Every authority consulted confirmed it as the fastest way to rescue the most children from a life of direst poverty. Every authority, that is, except the general public, who oppose removing the cap by 56% to 31%, YouGov finds. This was an unpopular act knowingly taken for good reasons. Not many will read the taskforce’s findings, but if they did, even the meanest mind might soften: the dismal facts of a child’s life in poverty are, as ever, shocking.
All the many measures in this far-reaching policy will lift 550,000 children above the poverty line by 2030 – the most achieved within one parliament. But that leaves behind about 4 million poor children living without the basics. That still makes us among the most unequal and most poverty-stricken of similar European countries. This is a major factor in why British five-year-olds have now become up to 7cms shorter than children of the same age in Europe.
