Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Debate between Stuart Anderson and Lizzi Collinge

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

[Lizzi Collinge]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that fecklessness is not limited to any one socioeconomic group. It is interesting how people born into great wealth consider their position to be due only to their very hard work, yet they consider it to be other people’s own fault if they are born into poverty. That is really quite shocking.

More than 1 million children live in households unable to afford even the most basic necessities of life. There are parents choosing between heating and eating, children doing their homework on the floor in housing that is too crowded to provide a space to study, whole families staying in one room because that is all they can afford to heat, and kids wheezing due to damp. What compounds this heartbreak is that childhood poverty festers and grows. It infects people’s prospects in education, health and employment across their whole life.

Rather than tackling that, discussions about welfare inevitably descend into conversations about merit: who deserves help and who does not. These are children we are talking about—children entirely reliant on adults for their existence and their support, and entirely reliant on Governments such as ours to make sure they are looked after if, from no fault of their own, their parents do not have enough money for the necessities of life.

If this Victorian attitude to the deserving and undeserving poor had won the day previously, we would not have had any of the public services that we now take for granted. We would not have had free education, because why should parents not just pay for education themselves? We would not have had the NHS, because why should people not just pay for doctors themselves? As we know, Reform Members would be very happy to get rid of the NHS and bring in a private insurance system. None of us earned those things through our own merit; we inherited them from people who recognised that everyone deserves a good chance in life and the chance to thrive and succeed, whether by starting their own business, getting an education or doing whatever it is that will make their life a good life. That is the obligation we have to our children.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others have shown that scrapping the two-child benefit limit could drive the single largest fall in child poverty in a single Parliament. My local Citizens Advice has done a brilliant report saying that scrapping the two-child limit is the fastest and most cost-effective intervention to tackle child poverty.

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member is making an impassioned speech. If the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that this will be the biggest change made in a Parliament —a full parliamentary term—why are the Government doing it now after refusing to do it 18 months ago?

[Lizzi Collinge]

That is actually a reasonable question. The answer is that we had to make sure the country could afford it and we had to take a strategic approach to tackling child poverty. What we were not going to do, given the absolute state of the economy when we came into government, was make very quick decisions on such a scale. We did it properly, carefully and as part of a strategy. [Interruption.] I am interested by Opposition Members’ interpretation of reality.

Let us not forget—moving on to something else that seems to have been missed in this discussion—that the families hit hardest by the two-child limit are those who spend the largest share of their income on absolute essentials. Lifting those families out of poverty not only reduces hardship, but actually boosts the local economy in the same way that raising the minimum wage does. In Morecambe and Lunesdale, I have thousands of fantastic small local businesses who rely on local people having enough money in their pockets to go out and spend, whether it is in the corner shop, the local supermarket or the clothes shop on the front where I get my kids’ school uniforms. They rely on people spending and we know that people who are hard up spend every single penny that they have. I have spoken in this Chamber before about the cost saving of prevention. This measure is no different. Investing in our children now pays dividends later, improving educational outcomes and raising adult earnings.

Even if, in the face of all contradictory evidence, we accept the myth sown by the right that all the parents affected by the cap are somehow scroungers and feckless, I still do not believe that their children should have to live in poverty. Using children as pawns to influence parental behaviour or illustrate moral lessons not only does not work, it is profoundly unjust. And it did not work. Even by its own logic, the two-child benefit limit has been woefully ineffective. Back in 2019, a cross-party Work and Pensions Committee found “no evidence” that it was working as intended. It had next to no effect on employment rates and hours worked in affected households, and the stated effect on birth rate is so tiny that it is doubtful that it is greater than the margin of error in the data. The cap has not led to greater employment rates or a higher number of hours worked. What the cap has done is make childcare and travel costs an even higher barrier for those households who are trying desperately to work more.

The two-child benefit cap also assumed that all pregnancies are planned, in full knowledge of the Government’s social security policy. I do not know about others, but most people I know are not over the details of social security policy. We know that it is simply not true that all pregnancies are planned. We know that contraceptives fail. Stuff happens. I remember when Tony Blair had an oopsie baby in the ’90s. With apologies to the Blairs for referring to them, I remember my dad saying, “Well, if the Prime Minister can’t always get it right, how we do expect every single person in the country to do so?”

We also know—it became really clear from the previous Conservative policy—that a startling number of children are conceived through rape. The policy meant that traumatised women were having to disclose their rape to faceless bureaucrats just to try to get enough money to raise the child who had been conceived through rape. That is surely compounding the trauma of survivors of sexual assault.

Finally, our country’s future depends on investing in the potential of our children—all our children, wherever they were born and however they were conceived. Today, we are saying that there are no second-class children in Britain and that under a Labour Government child poverty is not an inevitability. It is a choice and we choose to end it.