Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

2nd reading & Money resolution
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Pat McFadden]

Not at the moment.

As I said, around half the families who will benefit were not on universal credit when they had any of their children. These are people who found themselves in need of help long after any decisions about family size had been taken.

No account was taken of the costs of the policy further down the line, such as lower educational attainment, worse mental health and lower earnings, perhaps for the whole of people’s working lives.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Does the Secretary of State regret saying that whether the two-child cap on benefits causes harm is “open to debate”?

[Pat McFadden]

No, I do not regret anything I have ever said on this issue. All along in this debate, there has been an attempt to divide workers from non-workers—

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[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I will touch briefly on the Conservatives’ position and then turn to the Bill itself.

The Conservatives have at least been consistent on this policy—consistently cruel. I would point out the level of detachment with the reality faced by so many families in my constituency. The reality for such a high percentage of families is they do not choose whether to have children. They do not sit down and work out whether the money adds up. The reason that the rape clause is in place is because so many people are not able to make those choices. People do not set out with an intention to have a certain number of children; it is about what happens in the circumstances that are created.

[Dr Luke Evans]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Kirsty Blackman]

I will not.

The reality is that the Conservatives’ position is a very entitled, privileged one, and it does not reflect the majority of our constituents.

[Dr Luke Evans]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Kirsty Blackman]

I said I would not give way.

Let me turn to where we are today. The Labour party is being a bit smug about the position we are in. The SNP has been absolutely consistent in calling for the removal of the two-child cap. Alison Thewliss stood in this Chamber and highlighted the rape clause at every possible opportunity; I think people got fed up with her talking about it so much, but she was one of the people leading the charge. On that note, I thank those Labour Members who did back removing the two-child cap at the earliest opportunity. I understand how difficult it is to do that, and I appreciate that they were willing to put their principles first.

Today is a good day because the two-child cap is being cancelled. I am sad, though, that the Secretary of State said that he does not regret anything he has said before on this. That means he does not regret saying that it is “open to debate” whether the two-child cap causes harm, despite the fact that he is now saying absolutely the opposite.

I am glad that the Government are finally scrapping this policy. Children should not be at the sharp end of Government decisions, just as older people whose winter fuel payment was scrapped should not be at the sharp end. None of them is able to take these decisions on their finances. None of them can work a few more hours: a six-year-old cannot do that; a pensioner cannot just work a few more hours, because they may be significantly over the pension age and unable to work.

We need to recognise what has been said by a significant number of Members today, which is that so many of these families are in work. People are working hard; it is just that work does not pay—it does not pay enough. If we look at the stats, we see that people feel that the social security system should provide enough support for people to be able to live. We know that people living on universal credit—particularly large families—cannot afford the essentials, even if they are working. That is what this debate is about: giving people the best chance in life.

The Government, however, are not going far enough yet. The strategy that came out of their child poverty taskforce was simply a reiteration of many things that had already been announced. It was a summary: “Here we are. Here are all the things we have announced already as a Government.” It does not have the ambition we need in order to see child poverty tackled. If we look at the stats, we see that the rate of children in poverty by the end of this Parliament will be exactly the same as it is now. This measure will not reduce child poverty over the piece; the same percentage of children will be in poverty as are in poverty now, because the Government are failing to have ambition.

The UK Government should look at the Scottish child payment, as I asked them to do the other day. They should look at the amount of additional money being provided, particularly as of next year, to families with children under one, in recognition of the difficulty and importance of those first 1,000 days. They should look at those uplifts to ensure that people are taken out of poverty, at the baby box, at the Best Start grants being provided to families, and at the tackling child poverty delivery plan that the Scottish Government will bring out in March. Unlike the UK Government’s paper, which simply lays out a number of great things that the Government say they are doing, we have targets in our plan; We are looking at the actual difference that each of our policies make. I urge the UK Government to look at what is being done in Scotland and at the fact that child poverty is lower in Scotland than in any other part of the UK, and to consider what can be done to ensure that children have the best possible start in life, whether they live in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland.

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[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

The Government have drawn this Bill too narrowly. It will, as Members have mentioned several times, leave at least 150,000 children in larger families with no extra help at all. For example, Maryam, highlighted by the Z2K charity, is a lone parent of three. She fled from domestic abuse and relies on us for her income while she restarts her life. Abolishing the two-child limit alone will not improve her life one bit, because she is affected by both the two-child limit and the overall benefit cap.

In December, after this policy change was finally announced—about 18 months after the Government should have taken action—I asked Ministers how many families and children would be excluded from the extra help, and they told me that that information was not available. It is beyond me how they could decide that this policy would leave out children without knowing exactly how many. DWP data shows that there are nearly 1,000 families subject to the benefit cap in my constituency, but I was not told—and I still do not know—how many of my families will be excluded from the provisions in the Bill. We do know how many children in total will be left out and not helped. The impact assessment for the Bill says that 50,000 families will see no gain at all, and that another 20,000 families in the first year will only partially gain before the household benefit cap kicks in for them too. In total, at least 200,000 children will not get the help they need from the Government.

The benefit cap, like the two-child limit, was always unjust. Introduced by the Conservatives who used headlines and misrepresentations, they drove up stigma and demonisation—demonisation of children in poverty and their parents. The Conservatives failed to see that social security is security for everyone, and that this spending pays back in wider benefits that the Treasury and the country will see. We should not limit lives through prejudice,

[Kirsty Blackman]

Does the hon. Member share my concerns that the arguments that are being made by the Labour Government in cancelling the two-child cap were applicable 19 months ago, and that 61,000 children could have been kept out of poverty if the Government had agreed with us in debates on the King’s Speech, rather than waiting until now?

[Siân Berry]

I thank the hon. Member for pointing out yet again that some of us in this House voted to move on this issue many, many months ago, and it is about time that the Government caught up.

I utterly reject the racist agenda of Reform’s objections. The fact is that the Bill is not wrong, but it fails to do right by far too many children, so what will the Government do to fix that? The scope of the Bill could be widened by the Government to remove the benefit cap. This could be done through a motion or even by a simple amendment, which I have been trying to achieve. It is down to the Government to listen to Members who have spoken on this issue today. I quite simply ask them whether they will now act.

Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Monday 23rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

It is a privilege to bring this Bill back before the House. This Government believe that everybody should have opportunity in life: opportunity to achieve their potential and their ambitions, whatever their background. However, at the moment too many children are held back by the scourge of poverty, which affects their wellbeing, how well they do at school and their prospects in their adult working lives as well. No child should have to face lifelong consequences like those, and neither should the country have to bear the huge cost of so much wasted talent and potential.

Lifting the two-child limit in universal credit is the single most cost effective lever that we can pull to reduce substantially the number of children growing up in poverty. In doing so, we are helping hundreds of thousands of children to live better lives, supporting their families and investing in their future success. It is this Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity, to change the course of children’s lives for the better and to build a more hopeful future. The Bill makes a big contribution, delivering more security, more opportunity and more respect for families and communities across the UK.

Clause 1 removes the universal credit two-child limit in Great Britain from April this year. By doing so, we will lift 450,000 children out of poverty. That means that for assessment periods starting on or after 6 April, the universal credit child element will be included for all children in the household, increasing the amount of social security support available to families on universal credit with three or more children. All the associated exceptions will be removed at the same time, including the notorious rape clause.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Specifically on that point, does the Department have good enough data on subsequent children? Have people provided the information that the Department needs to ensure that the extra payments can be made timeously?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

We are confident that we can do that from April onwards. Reinstating support for all children in universal credit is a key step to tackling the structural drivers of child poverty. This Bill, combined with other measures in our child poverty strategy, will lift over half a million children out of poverty.

Clause 2 removes the two-child limit from universal credit in Northern Ireland from April. We are including Northern Ireland in the Bill at the request of the Northern Ireland Executive, who are bringing forward a legislative consent motion in the usual way. I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in his place. On Second Reading, he made the point that 50,000 children in Northern Ireland will be lifted out of child poverty. He rightly said:

“If anyone is against that, there is something wrong with them.”—[Official Report, 3 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 168.]

I agree with him on that point and I am grateful to him for making it.

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To working parents across the country, particularly the self-employed, scrapping the cap sends entirely the wrong message. They are making difficult choices about family size because the state is not going to swoop in and cover the cost. Can we really look working parents in the eye and say that we voted for a system that requires them to make tough decisions while absolving families on benefits from the same dilemmas?

[Kirsty Blackman]

Is the hon. Lady aware of what percentage of people currently subject to the two-child cap are in work? Is she aware that 22% of people on universal credit earn more money than the personal allowance and therefore pay income tax?

[Rebecca Smith]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, which provides me with a great opportunity to say something that I realised again while preparing for this debate. We know that lots of working people claim universal credit, but what we do not know is how many hours those people work, which would enable us to ascertain how many of them are full-time workers and how many are part-time workers. Of course, if they are full-time workers, there is one argument to be made, but if—as I would assume—the vast majority are part-time workers, we need to be encouraging them to work more hours. Later in my speech, I am going to get to a point where this is a problem, given all the other passported benefits that they get once they are entitled to universal credit.

How can it be fair to expect working parents to subsidise other families’ decisions that lie beyond their own financial reach? We also must not forget the single people whose household overheads are higher than in dual-income households. In 2024, there were 8.4 million people living alone in the UK—nearly 30% of households. They, too, should not be saddled with the extra tax burden that scrapping the two-child limit will inevitably create.

This Labour Government prefer handouts to hard choices. Giving away cash will always be more popular than exercising fiscal responsibility—the Back Benchers like it, and the left-wing think-tanks like it. The families who will get thousands more pounds every year like it, and who can blame them? Spending other people’s money is an easy way for the Government to feel good about themselves, but that money must come from somewhere. This Government are only pretending that they can afford to scrap the cap; originally, they said that doing so was unaffordable. That is true—the cost of this policy will be about £3.5 billion—but instead of sticking to his guns, our Prime Minister has capitulated to his Back Benchers. It requires backbone to bring the welfare budget under control, and backbone is exactly what Labour lacks.

In contrast, previous Conservative Governments did indeed control spending; until the pandemic, spending on working-age welfare fell in real terms. That is why we have committed to save £23 billion. We will crack down on the abuse of Motability, we will stop handing out benefits to foreign nationals—because citizenship should mean something—and we will stop giving benefits to people with low-level mental health problems, to ensure that we can target support to the people who need it most.

Under Labour, the overall benefits bill continues to balloon. By the end of this decade, health and disability benefits alone are set to reach £100 billion—I did read that right. Scrapping the cap is fiscally irresponsible and Labour knows it. This Bill will only increase the tax burden on hard-working men and women whose household budgets are already being stretched to the limit.

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[Kirsty Blackman]

It is great to get a chance to speak in Committee on the two-child limit Bill. I am so pleased that this Bill is progressing and that this has happened. This is something we have stood from these Benches and argued about for so many years. It finally seems that it will be real. I got into trouble with a Government Minister for not welcoming the Bill—I have welcomed it at every opportunity and am pleased that the two-child limit is being removed. In fact, I had my own Bill to remove the limit, so I could hardly do anything but welcome this Bill.

I stand to talk about the amendments. We support all three new clauses that have been put forward. New clause 1 would ensure that we look at the benefit cap, and I agree with the points that have been put forward about that. I particularly enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) just now. It was spot on in talking about the impacts of poverty on the life chances of children forever. It is not just the two-child limit that has caused this. It is one element that has increased and exacerbated child poverty, but so has the benefit cap. Of the families covered by the two-child limit, 40% have a disabled family member in the household, whether it is one of the children or one of the parents. The benefit cap overwhelmingly hits people with disabled family members.

If we are saying that personal independence payment and the additional payments made through the universal credit system, whether it is the child element or the limited capability for work element, are paid to recognise the additional costs of disability and the complex circumstances people face that contribute to their poverty, inability to work more hours, illness or ill health, why are we putting a cap on it?

Why are we saying, “We believe that children cost more money and that people on universal credit deserve more money depending on how many children they have because children should not go hungry”, which I believe is what the Government are saying here, but then capping it? Why are we saying, “Children should not go hungry—unless you hit the benefit cap, can’t take on additional hours because of a set of complex circumstances or have complex health needs that require an adapted house that costs more to rent”, for example? Why are we saying that those additional payments are reasonable, but only for some people? The Government need to look at the benefit cap again. That is covered by new clause 1. There are a number of things the Government need to look at again, which are covered by the other new clauses.

The Government have made welcome moves on clawbacks and universal credit repayments. They have reduced the percentage that people can pay back in clawbacks. However, they have not taken any steps to look at the affordability of clawbacks. They are just set at a percentage without taking into account whether people can afford to pay back universal credit that has been overpaid or paid as an advance. That means that some families are significantly disadvantaged. They may have more outgoings because they live somewhere like Brighton, where rents are absolutely through the roof, or like the north of Scotland, where heating costs a fortune because it is freezing more often than it is down here. None of the repayment schemes look at these additional issues or at whether people can afford them. I also urge the Government to look at whether that is contributing to child poverty.

The hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) said something along the lines of, “We don’t solve poverty by ensuring that people have money,” but we literally do. We literally solve poverty by ensuring that people have enough money. That is the solution. The cure for poverty is to have enough money to pay for the heating, the food your children need, or a pair of shoes when your child needs them. It is incredible how fast they grow, by the way. I think my son went through about five sizes in the space of a year and a half. It is impossible to keep children in shoes that quick, or even to get to the shops that quick. Children grow really quickly and it costs an awful lot of money. It is therefore really important that the Government’s child poverty measures are monitored correctly to ensure that they make all the differences the Government are proposing. We need to see whether enough of a difference is being made and whether the measures are having the effect on outcomes that we want to see.

The Government put forward a child poverty strategy that I felt was deeply unambitious. Other than the two-child limit stuff, it mostly laid out things that the Government had already announced. It was also almost entirely about only England or England and Wales and did not apply in Scotland, other than the universal credit stuff. For example, none of the childcare, free school meals or school uniforms stuff applies in Scotland.

I still feel that we do not have enough information about monitoring, so the three new clauses, which would provide for additional monitoring of the reduction in child poverty, are incredibly important. The Government will not produce their baseline monitoring and evaluation report on the child poverty strategy until summer 2026, so we do not yet have enough information about how they will measure that.

I would love it if we had Governments who were absolutely up front and honest about which measures are working and which are not, but we have consistently had Governments who introduce primary and secondary legislation but fail to do post-implementation reviews of it. They fail to tell us whether the legislation has had the intended consequence. Did it make £30,000? Did it make £30 million? That is perhaps what the Government told us the legislation would make, but because a post-implementation review does not happen, we do not see whether it was effective.

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[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about it not being a child’s fault that they are growing up in poverty. I grew up in poverty, caring for two disabled parents, and I would also say that it is not the parents’ fault; it is society’s fault. When we say that people should be poor, and we create the structures and systems that enable that, we are all responsible. The Bill is just one way in which this Parliament can say to the country, “We will not put up with poverty for anyone ever again—it is not people’s fault.” Does she agree?

[Kirsty Blackman]

That is absolutely true. I accept the rebuke, which is completely reasonable. It is not the parents’ fault—I should have been far clearer about that. I tend to think that poverty and a lack of privilege are caused by a lack of choices. Poverty means that people cannot make mistakes, while privilege means that they can. I can make mistakes because I have enough of a financial cushion and family support. For people who live in poverty, without family support or with poor mental health, one mistake can mean very quickly spiralling into an un-rescuable situation. That is how I think about privilege: those situations are not anybody’s fault. Just because I am lucky enough to be in a more privileged position, I am allowed to make far more mistakes than someone who is struggling on the breadline. How is that fair?

Conservative Members made comments about people working hard. A lot of the people who are on universal credit while working are in the jobs that we really need people to do. They work as carers, shopworkers and all sorts of other jobs that not one of us would say are easy. I do not know if any Members have worked as care workers. The hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) has been a carer and knows how physically and emotionally demanding that is. Someone working in care and being paid the minimum wage is doing a physically demanding, very necessary and hard job, yet they might still be in receipt of universal credit because they earn so little. I hate the distinction made between people who work hard and people who do not, when that is based simply on salary—not the fact that lots and lots of people work hard for very little money, because the minimum wage is not a real living wage but just a minimum wage.

I think I have been clear about some of the issues raised in the debate, including the benefit cap, issues faced by disabled family members and disabled children, and the effect of these measures on child poverty, destitution and wider social outcomes. On that last point, all of us, and particularly Governments, could probably do more about the impacts of poverty and ensuring that those are also measured.

Some of the monitoring and evaluation suggestions for the child poverty strategy look at the cold, hard measure of how many children are in poverty, and at how those numbers are reduced or increased as things go on, but they look less at some of the impacts. To be fair to the hon. Member for South West Devon, how do such measures impact on school readiness? Can we see more information on whether the Government’s plans have had an impact on school readiness? Has there been an improvement in the mental health of young people as a result of these measures on child poverty?

I still think that the Government are deeply unambitious and they could do more on the benefit cap. They could also do more, for example, to match the Scottish child payment; child poverty has been reducing in Scotland because that is the key mission of our SNP Government. It is worth looking at what works anywhere in these islands, and seeing whether it could or should be replicated to ensure that we reduce poverty and protect children, and that everybody has those opportunities—no matter how much their parents earn, how many children are in the family and whether there is a disabled family member. It is important that every one of us champions every child in our constituencies, and tries to ensure that they get the best possible start in life.

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the Minister.

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[Sir Stephen Timms]

My right hon. Friend is right that raising wages has been a crucial part of the Government’s strategy, but removing the benefit cap would reduce work incentives. My hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey) said that there is no evidence that that is the case, but actually there is such evidence—from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, for example. It is not a huge amount of evidence but nevertheless there is evidence that the benefit cap provides a modest but significant incentive for work. Our view, for the time being at least, is that that should be maintained.

We have published an impact assessment as part of the Bill. It sets out the number of households that will not gain in full or will only partially gain from this measure because of the benefit cap. The Department publishes quarterly statistics on the benefit cap, which includes the number of households that are capped and how that changes over time. The most recent quarterly statistics show that of 119,000 households capped at the start of the quarter that ended in August last year, 40,000—about one third—were no longer capped by the end of the quarter, although others were newly capped, so there is a lot of churn in the cohort of capped households. The 40,000 households that left that cohort included 2,900 who had ceased to be capped because their earnings exceeded the threshold of full-time earnings at the national living wage. We want to encourage more people to make that transition.

We also publish statistics on the number of households affected by both the two-child limit and the benefit cap, with the next annual statistics to be published in the summer. After that, the quarterly benefit cap statistics will show how the number of capped households has changed after the two-child limit has been removed.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Those statistics will show the number of households that are capped, but they will not show how many have come into the benefit cap as a result of the removal of the two-child limit. Will the Minister be able to show a link between how many new families are being capped as a result of the two-child limit, meaning that those households are now disadvantaged again, even though the two-child limit has been removed?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

We have set out estimates of the effects that we think will result from the removal of the two-child limit, and there will be more information in the baseline evaluation report that we will publish in the summer.

My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) made some important points. I particularly agree with her about the importance of scrapping the rape clause, which had been a feature of the legislation since the two-child limit was introduced. She is right that we need to understand properly the impacts of policy interventions. We have published a monitoring and evaluation framework alongside the child poverty strategy that sets out how we will track and evaluate progress, reflecting our commitment to transparency, accountability and continuing to learn from what is effective. The baseline report will be published in the summer, as I have said, and set out details on plans alongside the latest statistics and evidence, and we will report annually on progress after that.

The information that we are committed to publish will provide the information looked for in these new clauses. I very much look forward to the report from the Work and Pensions Committee, which was referred to in an intervention by the Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams).

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[Kirsty Blackman]

The SNP has been at the forefront of opposing this policy since the very first day it came in. Since the very first day that we spotted in the legislation the rape clause, which meant that people were going to have to tell the Department for Work and Pensions that they had been raped in order to get an exemption from the two-child limit. Women had to go through that cruel, inhumane system just to ensure that their children were eligible for the social security payments. From day one, this was a cruel policy from the nasty party.

This is not a debate about whether people should be working or not. This is not an issue that pits the workers against the workless. This is about children. This is about kids being able to afford to eat. This is about their parents being able to ensure that they can grow up in a house that is warm; that they can have food in their tummies before they go to school; that they can have shoes that fit. This is about ensuring that kids are looked after and have the best possible life chances. This is about ensuring that poverty is reduced. No child should be growing up in poverty. No child, whether their parents are working or not, should be growing up in poverty.

The Conservatives talk about making work pay. Well, they could have put in a real living wage, but they did not; they put in a pretendy living wage and called it the living wage, knowing that people could not actually live on it, so I am not sure they have a huge amount of high ground when it comes to making work pay. In fact, the system we have had until now has been the system the Conservatives created, so they do not have a great amount of high ground over the size of the social security system that Labour has been working with either, because that is the system they made.

I am pleased that Labour is removing the two-child limit today. I am pleased that it will come in from April. I am not terribly happy that it has taken us this long to get to that point.

Before I sit down, I want to commend every person across this House who has supported the removal of the two-child limit, and particularly those who have chosen to do so when their party did not want them to—that is the worst and most difficult position to be in. I really appreciate those who were willing to stick their head above the parapet and do what was right on this. I know it is incredibly hard to take that step.

We have heard lots of criticism today, with lots of people saying that the Bill could go further and that there is more that could be done. There is, inevitably, more that could be done; there is always more that could be done to keep children out of poverty. However, this is a good step. Children will be better off as a result. Children will have improved life chances. What are we all here for, if not that?

Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.