“Every day we delay, children are suffering the consequences of desperate poverty and inequality. Things will only get worse until this inhumane policy is scrapped.”
By Kim Johnson MP
Under the recent boundary changes, my Liverpool Riverside constituency now ranks as the most deprived in the country with almost 1 in 2 children (47%) living in poverty. Last week’s DWP figures show 1.6 million children nationally are impacted by the two-child cap on benefits, driving their families into desperate poverty.
After 14 years of Tory decay and decline, 4.3 million children are living in poverty, with 1 in 9 of all children now living in a household whose income is restricted by the two-child limit to benefit payments.
Recent research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that the cap costs families affected on average £4,300 per year, representing 10 percent of their income. HMRC statistics from last year show that half of families affected by the cap were single parents and 57 percent had at least one adult in paid work.
There is a strong positive correlation between levels of child poverty in an area and numbers of families impacted by this policy. Scrapping the cap would lift 500,000 children out of poverty overnight, at the cost of roughly £3.4 billion per year.
In the sixth richest economy in the world, no child should be living below the breadline. Economists and anti-poverty campaigners alike have said that scrapping the two-child cap on benefits would be the most cost-effective and impactful way to immediately alleviate child poverty in this country.
I have long campaigned for an end to child poverty, including the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap and the roll-out of universal free school meals as important steps to alleviating the almost Victorian levels of child poverty.
There is broad support for this policy across the political spectrum inside the Labour government and beyond. The Labour leadership has indicated that it will lift the cap once it is sure it has the financial means to do so. I believe that tackling child poverty and inequality must be a top priority for the new Labour government, so if it does not commit to abolishing the two-child cap at the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday, I am planning to move an amendment to the King’s Speech to help demonstrate the strength of feeling on this issue and encourage the new government to progress quickly with this crucial policy.
After the last Labour Government was formed in 1997, I worked for six years setting up Sure Start centres across the North West with money from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to tackle child poverty and inequality. There’s no doubt that their ambitious targets on child poverty were transformative to the lives of millions of children – and I saw these benefits first hand.
Now, the current cost of living crisis is adding unbearable pressure to an already critical situation for many families who are struggling to make ends meet. Children are incredibly aware of the stigma of poverty and inequality, and the pressure of this can have lifelong psychological effects on top of the material impact on educational attainment and life chances and associated health problems.
Larger families are punished, leaving them struggling. Nearly two-thirds of the families that are affected by the policy are already in work. Black and Ethnic Minority families and single-parent families are disproportionately impacted, as well as families that rent. The two-child limit creates a huge hole in budgets that simply cannot be plugged by working additional hours.
After 14 years of Tory austerity and a cost-of-living crisis, we must be far bolder in our ambitions than we were in 1997. Economists, anti-poverty campaign groups, and politicians from across the spectrum from Gordon Brown to Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to the former Tory welfare minister David Freud have all condemned the two-child cap and I wholeheartedly agree with Liz Kendall, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, when she said: “Too many children are growing up in poverty and this is a stain on our society.”
While Labour’s commitment to a child poverty strategy is welcome, we must be clear – there is no way to deliver on a bold, ambitious plan to reduce child poverty without scrapping the two-child limit. Every day we delay, children are suffering the consequences of desperate poverty and inequality. Things will only get worse until this inhumane policy is scrapped.
Now for the first time in 14 years we have a Labour government, one that will deliver progressive policies for working people. We have hundreds of new MPs that have entered Parliament eager to deliver for their communities, excited to be a Party in government that will make the lives of their constituents materially better. We are a very rich country, yet poverty has been a political choice for the past 14 years. This needs to change.
Together, I hope that we can persuade the Labour leadership that scrapping the two-child cap must be a priority for our plan for government so we can deliver an immediate boost to living standards and life chances for those most in need.
- Kim Johnson MP is the MP for Liverpool Riverside, you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and Tik Tok.
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