Forget politics, think families: It's time to scrap two-child limit

23 July 2024, 09:30 | Updated: 23 July 2024, 09:31

The two-child limit has been around for over seven years, but it’s taken Starmer’s election of Prime Minister for it to get sustained attention.

Anti-poverty charities, think tanks and academic researchers like me have long been flagging the harm the policy causes, which drives poverty among children, arguably by its very design. Every day that the policy remains in place more children are born into a UK in which it exists, and risk being affected by the harm it causes.

But it’s taken an internal debate within Labour for it to really hit the media headlines. It may be naive but I’d like to take the politics out of the two-child limit. Surely we’d all like to see a country in which every child can thrive, and can grow up safe in the knowledge that their needs will be met? That is something which each and every MP should be willing to stand up and support, but, sadly, that does not yet seem to be the case.

There are lots of reasons for this. One may be that people often do not have an accurate picture of the two-child limit: how it operates, who it affects. It hits people in work as well as those currently not working - 59% of households affected contain someone in work. And most of those affected live in three or four children families (87%); a household type which is not so very unusual.

Vitally, though the media commonly describe it as the ‘two-child benefit cap’, this is a bit confusing. As well as the two-child limit, which restricts means-tested support to the first two children in a household, there is another policy, the ‘benefit cap’, which places a literal cap on the support a household can receive. Both policies do great damage in breaking the link between needs and entitlement in our social security system.

And while we often hear defenders of the two-child limit talk about families making ‘decisions’ about what they can afford, this presumes we can all know how our child rearing years will go. But this is simply not true. Any one of us could lose our job, become ill, or experience relationship breakdown, and then find ourselves in need of additional support. This is exactly what the social security system is supposed to be there for - to prevent poverty, and to catch us before we fall. Just as the NHS does (or tries to).

There is no doubt that a Labour committed to tackling child poverty needs to get rid of of the two-child limit and its sister policy, the benefit cap. In fact, that should be only the start.

It’s good to hear Starmer saying that this is on the table, but I just hope he knows that our nation’s families simply cannot wait. They are struggling day in, day out, as a result of its existence, and so it just urgently needs to go.

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Ruth Patrick is Professor of Social Policy at the University of York. She leads the 'Benefit Changes and Larger Families Project', the largest independent investigation of the impact of the two-child limit and the benefit cap, funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

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