Labour must scrap the two-child benefit cap to relieve child poverty

Editorial: Keir Starmer ought to be ‘pushing at an open door’ to reverse the deeply unpopular measure – all points on the political spectrum agree with him

Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson during a campaign visit to a Nuneaton primary school last month (PA)

It is The Independent’s firm belief that children should not suffer for the poor choices made by adults. That is why we oppose the two-child limit on state benefits: parental responsibility is important, but the inevitable effect of the policy is to impoverish children who are not responsible for having been brought into the world.

It was significant, therefore, that Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, repeated his opposition to a policy that he described as “wrong” and added that he thought “we are pushing at an open door”.

Sir Keir Starmer had some of his more uncomfortable moments during the election campaign when he tried to explain why he refused to promise to lift the two-child limit. He insisted that the state of the public finances made it impossible to make that promise, but struggled to explain why he was prepared to promise modest spending increases on schools and the NHS and not on relieving child poverty.

The policy was brought in by George Osborne as chancellor in 2017 and restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households. Because it applies to children born since then, it has a growing impact, affecting hundreds of thousands more children each year.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says: “The two-child limit is one of the most significant welfare cuts since 2010 and, unlike many of those cuts, it becomes more important each year as it is rolled out to more families.”

Sir Keir finds himself besieged on all sides by voices calling for the limit to be lifted. Even Suella Braverman, widely considered to be the most right-wing candidate for the Conservative Party leadership, opposes the policy. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, when asked during one of the TV debates, agreed with her, saying that “we should be encouraging people to have families”.

On Sir Keir’s other side, Gordon Brown, the Labour former prime minister, has called for the policy to be scrapped, while in the middle the Liberal Democrats want to abolish it too.

The most important pressure on the prime minister, however, will come from within the Labour Party in parliament. Mr Sarwar and Mr Brown are the outriders for what most of the 411 Labour MPs really think – as opposed to the silence of the manifesto on which they stood. If £2.5bn a year, the cost of ending the policy, should become available, the lifting of the two-child limit would be a high priority for them.

So it should be. It is not a vast amount of money in the big picture of government spending – although it shows up in the Treasury’s books as a rising amount, given the way the policy is being gradually rolled out. Of course, government is all about priorities and tough choices. Sir Keir is holding to a tough line on defence spending while he is in Washington – and he is right to do so: Britain already spends more as a share of our national income on defence than any other Nato member apart from the United States.

But it is a basic requirement of a civilised society that it should prevent child poverty from rising, and so Rachel Reeves, as she prepares her first Budget, should give the lifting of the two-child limit the priority it deserves.