Keir Starmer under pressure to scrap two-child benefit cap

The Labour government is facing pressure from its backbenchers to scrap the two-child benefit cap, after new figures showed the number of children affected by the policy increased to a record 1.6 million children in the year to April. Labour said during the election campaign it would not remove the cap, which limits most child welfare payments to the first two children in families. It was introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 to reduce the overall welfare bill. Kim Johnson, Labour’s MP for Liverpool Riverside, called the policy “cruel, punitive and is pushing struggling families into further poverty” and vowed to lay an amendment to next Wednesday’s King’s Speech. Labour rebels are expected to be joined by critics of the cap from opposition parties including the Liberal Democrats, Green Party, and the Scottish National Party, as well as independents. 

John McDonnell, former shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, told Times Radio he would back the change to the government’s legislative agenda for the next year in the hope of forcing Keir Starmer to “concede”. He added: “Now we’re in government, it’s just a matter of saying, ‘Look, how practically can we do this?’”

He added: “And most of us think this needs to be done sooner rather than later, because of the immense suffering our children are going through in every constituency. We have hundreds of children living in poverty and this could lift them out of that poverty.”

A number of charities and think tanks including Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), the Church of England, End Child Poverty and the Benefit Changes and Larger Families have called on the Government to reconsider the cap. 

Barnardo’s chief executive Lynn Perry called the limit “one of the biggest policy drivers of child poverty” while research from the Resolution Foundation found that six out of 10 families affected by the two-child limit were already in work.