Two-child Benefit Cap and Child Poverty

Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for the intervention and the Welsh Government for rolling out universal free school meals, and I support her and the Welsh Government in saying we need to end the two-child cap.

Does the Minister really believe it is acceptable for children to suffer more just because of the number of siblings they have? The two-child cap on benefit payments is cruel and ineffective. Larger families are punished, leaving them struggling. A majority—some 55%—of the families affected by the policy are already in work. Black and ethnic minority families and single-parent families are disproportionately impacted, as well as families who rent. The two-child limit creates a huge hole in budgets that simply cannot be plugged by working additional hours. The Government claim that the policy helps to push parents back into work, but after six years, they still cannot provide a single shred of evidence that that is actually the case. The truth is that the policy does nothing to remove barriers, and research from the University of York shows that in some cases, the cap is counterproductive in helping parents back to work.

[Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate and for all her campaigning on the issue. I completely with her points about poverty and children suffering, but I have a slightly different concern about this punitive policy. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is an absolute disgrace that the rape clause is still in effect? I ask the Minister not to ignore that point. Why is the clause still on the statute book, and why will the Government not repeal it?

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my hon. friend for raising that important point, and I will come to it later.

Last year, 1,830 mums were forced to declare that they were raped in order to be eligible for extra support for their children—compelled to disclose horrific and personal details. The anguish that this demand creates for women has been found to have an impact on their decisions to terminate pregnancies. Just take a second to consider that. Imagine a woman having survived such a deeply traumatic ordeal, to then be faced with a Government policy that makes her feel she can no longer carry on with her pregnancy. It is so deeply cruel and damaging that we have to ask whether the Ministers who devised that heartless policy had an ounce of compassion between them.

We know that lifting the cap would immediately raise 250,000 children out of poverty, and a further 850,000 out of deep poverty. Campaigners call it the single most effective intervention that would tackle child poverty immediately. It would cost this Government just £1.3 billion. Consider that against the £37 billion that they wasted on a failed test and trace system, the £5 billion that they found for the defence budget in March, or the £9 billion tax cut to corporations and the pensions giveaway for the 1% that they so generously granted in the last Budget.

We know that the money is there to help struggling families, if we can only find the will. Poverty is a political choice, and time and time again this Government have chosen giveaways for the rich and scraps for the rest of us. Inflation is being driven by corporate greed creating record profits for the super-rich. The Government would like us to believe that there is no money to meet basic needs and support struggling families, but the reality is that it is just being hoarded by the 1%.

We are seeing the biggest drop in spending power in 70 years. Total spending on public services is set to be 12% lower in 2027-28 than in 2010, yet the wealth of UK billionaires has more than trebled since the Tories have been in government. With skyrocketing rent and energy bills eating into people’s pay packets, disposable income is being squeezed more and more. The record rise in food prices is pushing millions more into food insecurity.

There is a simple fix for this: enhanced workers’ rights to ensure that work pays enough to live and raise a family. That way, we can ensure that not a single child in this country goes hungry, and no child gets left behind. The evidence is there for all to see. Punishing families for having more than two children does not push parents back into work; it only drives more children into poverty. Tory austerity cuts were nothing less than an ideological drive to rig the economy in favour of the few at the expense of the many, and children in my constituency and across the country are now paying the price. The impact of growing up in poverty can be lifelong. We cannot wait for a new Labour Government to provide these children with a future; this Government must listen now and lift the two-child cap.

This debate is not the first time that I and many of my colleagues here in Westminster Hall today have raised these issues in this House over the years. We know the tired and misleading lines parroted by the Government, pointing to a rise in employment and a drop in absolute poverty over the course of their leadership of the country, so before the Minister gives his reply, I want him to consider the bleak reality of this situation. Work is no longer a route out of poverty. The Tories have undermined workers’ rights and trashed the very concept of work, to the extent that seven out of 10 children living in poverty in this country are in working families. Just let that statistic sink in for a minute: over two thirds of the children who live in poverty in the fifth richest country in the world are struggling because their parents’ wages are not enough to live on and raise a family.

In response to my question to the Prime Minister last month about the two-child benefit cap, the Prime Minister responded in his usual manner, by claiming that his Government had lifted 400,000 children out of absolute poverty since 2010. I am sure that Members in this Chamber would all agree that, on the face of it, that sounds like a really great achievement and one worth celebrating. However, as the Prime Minister and his Government well know, that statistic is misleading and does not take into account the impact of inflation, which is an approach that can only be described as being grotesquely out of touch during a cost of living crisis, when we see security tags put on basic necessities such as nappies and baby milk.

Economists and organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies use “relative poverty” as a much more accurate measure of the reality of the trajectory in poverty, and this measure clearly shows the deepening trend in child poverty that we see every day in our constituencies. I ask the Minister not to take us for fools today. We are here because we know the desperate reality facing so many of our constituents. We are here to demand better for them. We will not continue to go round in circles debating meaningless numbers while the Government continue to bury their head in the sand and ignore the struggles of the people they were elected to represent.

I thank the Minister again for responding to this debate and the arguments that we have made, and I hope that he can feel the strength of feeling in this Chamber today about the facts of poverty.