This article references rape.
As a child, Terri White experienced the crushing impact of poverty. Following the dawn of a new Labour government, she writes for GLAMOUR about how the two-child benefit cap – a policy that prohibits parents from claiming benefits for a third child – stigmatises mothers and pushes families further into poverty.
The two-child benefit cap, she argues, is very much a feminist issue. Read on here…
Last week, during the King’s Speech, I saw the light. King Charles, robed in ermine and velvet, was announcing the 40 bills making up the policy and legislative agenda of our new government. I was momentarily blinded; the light refracted through 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and four giant rubies set into the Imperial State Crown he wore (estimated value: £3-5 billion).
That record number of bills didn’t include the abolition of the welfare state’s most sadistic policy, the two-child limit (or its cousin in cruelty, the benefit cap – both severing the link between the size of a family’s need and state support, leading to the often-misused term ‘two-child benefit cap’), and as the billion-pound-bling sent my retinas bananas, I heard Keir Starmer’s voice in my head confirming (back in May) that “we are not going to be able to afford to scrap it”.
Not just the single biggest driver of child poverty, but the most cost-effective way out of it – according to the Child Poverty Action Group, abolishing the two-child limit would cost £1.7billion. Or, as it struck me in that moment as I squinted: just half, perhaps even a quarter, of King Charles’ crown.
The two-child limit was introduced in 2017 to deny third children (and beyond) state support of up to £3,455 a year. The policy’s architect, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that poor families had to learn to “cut their cloth” and that the welfare state encouraged “dysfunctional behaviour” (like, er, having kids) and promoted the belief that work was “a mug’s game”. Which is weird, given that 71% of kids in poverty live in working households.
And while it’s now considered by many to be cruel, I’d go further: it’s inhumane (a word that Deputy PM Angela Rayner used to describe it four years ago). And not just classist, but racist and misogynistic – harming our poorest, but also women disproportionately, single mothers, and Black and brown women and children.
If Keir Starmer had axed the two-child limit – like the government was lobbied to – he would have lifted 300,000 kids out of poverty entirely and a further 700,000 out of the deepest poverty overnight. A million kids helped, saved, at the cost of one half of one crown in one man’s vast jewellery collection.
After the crown returned to the Tower of London, Keir Starmer was in the Commons, facing an immediate challenge from his own benches. Sarah Owen, MP for Luton North, a constituency with a 45% child poverty rate (child poverty numbers are 4.3 million nationally), asked, “What reassurance can he give us that he’s taking it seriously?”