Universal Credit and Child Tax Credit: Two-child Limit

Debate between Kate Green and Rushanara Ali

Tuesday 27th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) on her tireless campaign on this very important subject and on securing today’s debate.

The issue sits in the context of the wider debate about universal credit, which will affect 1 million homeowners, slightly fewer than 750,000 households on disability benefits and 600,000 single parents. On universal credit, two in five households will lose about £52 a week in payments, and across many constituencies entire families will be severely affected—if they are not already. In areas where universal credit has already been rolled out, food bank use has increased by 52%. As the hon. Lady said, as part of the 2015 package, from April 2017 low-income families with a third or subsequent child lost their entitlement to additional support through child tax credits.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend agree that contrary to what the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) suggested, Labour did not support the two-child limit? We abstained on the Second Reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill but voted against Third Reading. Does she agree that we should place that on the record?

[Rushanara Ali]

I concur. It is really important that the Scottish National party, the Labour party and other parties that oppose the policy continue to work together, so that we can protect families. More families will be affected from February next year, as universal credit is rolled out, and the retrospective element, which the hon. Member for Glasgow Central mentioned, will be devastating. No family could have prepared for a policy that was to be applied retrospectively; nor is it right that children should be retrospectively punished in that way. This, in short, is a punishment of children, and it is totally inhumane. No Government should be standing up for such a policy. Given that the Minister has recently taken on his role and the policy was not his idea, I urge him to reflect carefully on what is being said and on the representation being made to him, to ensure that the policy is reviewed and reformed.

If the Government are concerned about family size and think that families should not be as large as they are, just as with teenage pregnancy, public education exercises can be more successful than punitive measures that punish children. In developing countries, where there is a case for encouraging smaller families because families cannot provide, family sizes have been brought down through education and women’s empowerment, but that is a different debate from what is happening here.

Philip Alston the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recently said of the two-child limit that it is “in the same ballpark” as China’s one-child policy, because it punishes people with more than two children. Reports also state:

“The UK government has inflicted ‘great misery’ on its people with ‘punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous’ austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity, the United Nations poverty envoy has found”.

It cannot be right that in one of the wealthiest economies of the world, our children face hunger and punishment.