Child Poverty: Benefit Cap

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be nerdy for a moment. We inherited two different policies. One is the two-child limit, which limits the benefits paid to any family to the first two children, except in certain circumstances; the second is the benefit cap we are talking about here, which limits the total amount that can be given to any family. I apologise—nerdiness over. One of the reasons this matters is that those problems have different solutions. One of the reasons we are having a child poverty strategy is that the different policies we inherited, the state of the social security system and the series of piecemeal changes all combine with rises in the cost of living, problems in social housing, problems with energy and problems across our society to produce the effects my noble friend is describing. That is why they have to be tackled together.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

Last week the blast furnaces at Port Talbot closed and 2,700 people lost their jobs. That surely has a massive influence on the number of children in poverty in Wales. In consultation with the Welsh Senedd, what proposals do the Government have to make sure that those workers are re-employed?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am so grateful to the noble Lord for raising that. One of the things we are determined to do is to revisit the way in which my department supports people into work. We need our jobcentres across the country to work closely with local, regional and devolved administrations to make sure we are addressing the problems in local labour markets and in local areas. In the near future we will publish a White Paper that sets out the new approach. But the noble Lord put his finger on it: we have to tackle the problems in communities to give people a chance of getting back to work. We need the country to be working—we want an 80% employment rate across our country. That is not just good for the economy or for the individuals; it is good for their children as well.