Sir Keir Starmer wants to end child poverty. One of his defining five missions is to “break down barriers to opportunity … to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain”. And last year he pledged his government would be “laser-focused on poverty”.
Fine words, and this week gives the chance to prove them. Amid the proposed laws in this government’s first king’s speech should be one that scraps the two-child cap on benefits. It impoverishes children, penalises ethnic minorities and humiliates women who have been raped. Unfair and morally repugnant, it is “the worst social security policy ever”, say academic experts. And government ministers know this.
The policy was dreamed up by George Osborne as chancellor, argued for by David Cameron as prime minister and finally launched by Theresa May and Philip Hammond in 2017. Under the cap, families on benefit receive a payment for each of their first two children from child tax credit or universal credit, but no more for any additional offspring. Larger families lose out on £3,455 a year for each child – a huge sum, especially for those on low incomes.
One in nine children live in families affected by the cap, according to government figures published this month. That equals 1.6 million children, or more than 17 Wembley Stadiums packed full of kids whose days are overshadowed by this cruel policy. It limits their diets, their clothing, their after-school clubs – and their childhoods. A three-year study of how larger families scrape by under the regime reported testimony from one mum, Wendy, who no longer reads to her youngest at bedtime because it clashes with when the local supermarket puts yellow stickers on the food it will otherwise chuck out.
The policy’s rationale was to encourage more people into work, while a few of the more obnoxious backbenchers may have spied a great wheeze to limit “benefits broods”. On either count, there’s scarce evidence the cap has succeeded. What is clear is the harm done to our society.
Children from ethnic minorities are more likely to live in larger families, so the policy is effectively racist. Children born of rape are exempt from the limit – but a parent has to fill out a form officially declaring them as such and, normally, provide a “third-party professional declaration” that agrees. Such is the casual inhumanity with which Britain treats its poor.
No wonder Kim Johnson, the MP for Liverpool Riverside, is urging this new government to scrap the limit. Among those who agree are Gordon Brown, John McDonnell, Andy Burnham – and Jonathan Reynolds, as late as 2021. That single move would lift half a million children out of poverty, yet the cabinet in which Mr Reynolds now sits argues that at £3.4bn it would cost too much just now. Yet it is only a little more than the cash Sir Keir last week promised to spend arming Ukraine, and is a fraction of the generous tax treatment promised to businesses by Rachel Reeves.
Sir Keir plainly wants this cap abolished, but asking poverty-stricken families to hold on until the chancellor has more cash is not fair. Nor does it honour Labour’s promise of change. In its first week this new government has broken with the ugly politics that marked the Tories’ decline. Good. Now it needs to jettison their ugly policies, too.
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