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The inhumanity of the two-child benefit cap

Labour’s refusal to scrap this cruel policy sends the message that children are a burden.

Ann Furedi

Topics Politics UK

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In the King’s Speech this week, the UK’s new Labour government announced that it would be establishing a new ‘child-poverty taskforce’. Curiously, however, it made no mention of scrapping the two-child benefit cap – even though UK prime minister Keir Starmer opposed the cap until relatively recently.

Why the change of heart? For a government so apparently concerned with child poverty, ditching the cap would seem to be a no-brainer. According to campaigners, doing so could potentially lift around 250,000 children out of financial hardship.

Currently, the cap prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit – benefits designed to help with the cost of raising a child – for any more than two children. The Conservatives introduced it in 2017, with the aim of encouraging people on benefits ‘to make the same choices as those supporting themselves solely through work’. At the time of its introduction, it affected around 71,000 households. That number has risen every year since, to 450,000 households today.

Both Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves have said they can’t afford to axe the cap, which would cost £1.3 billion. This may sound a fortune to us, but is little more than loose change when it comes to government spending. For context, the NHS spends roughly £500million a day.

It is unlikely that the Labour Party’s commitment is really about money. Rather, it is about ideology. The cap implies that two children is quite enough for a modern family. Any more than that is a display of fecklessness, which the state should not endorse. Why else would there be an exception to the rules for children born as a result of a multiple birth? Or for those children born of ‘non-consensual conception’? It is also notable that the definition of ‘non-consensual conception’ was not extended to include failure of contraceptives.

It is this lack of compassion that has led to such widespread opposition to the cap. It is opposed by a raft of anti-poverty groups, as well as by anti-racism groups, which argue that ethnic-minority families are disproportionately affected due to a cultural disposition to larger families. Paradoxical though it may seem, UK abortion provider BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), which I ran until 2021, has also been at the vanguard of opposition. BPAS recognises that far too many women request to abort otherwise wanted pregnancies because of their financial circumstances.

In a 2020 report, BPAS drew attention to the increasing number of abortions after the cap was introduced. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of abortions in England and Wales grew by 11.7 per cent. Significantly, this increase was higher among women who already had children. Women with no children or one child sought out abortions at an increase of 10.3 per cent and seven per cent respectively. But for women with two or more existing children, this rose by 16.4 per cent. Surely, many of these mothers felt pressured by the benefit cap to terminate their pregnancies – regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to.

BPAS is concerned about this because it is a pro-choice organisation. It recognises that just as some women choose abortion, some choose to have a child. Both of those choices sometimes need support. In the past it was abortion that was stigmatised, but now having multiple children is increasingly demonised.

We see this in the implication that large, underprivileged families are bad things in themselves. Social policy, it is argued, should encourage the poor to make different ‘choices’ and be denied support if they have ‘too many’ children. There is an ignorant callousness in the assumption that all women who become unintentionally pregnant can resort to abortion to keep their family size in check. That is simply untrue. Yes, for a growing proportion of women, abortion is used as another method of birth control. But for others, it is an unimaginable horror. And yet abortion is the only means for a married couple to prevent a third birth when all else fails.

Children should not be seen by the state as an expendable cost-saving. Instead, they should be cherished as an investment for the future, and in more than just a financial sense. They should be a cause for celebration. And just as no woman should be forced to have a child, no woman on benefits should be made to feel that her choice to give birth puts her beyond the limits of state assistance.

Public spending is all about priorities. We should be judging the government on which it picks. These decisions don’t just allocate funding, they send messages. The message of the two-child benefit cap is that families are a burden that only the privileged can afford.

Picture by: Getty.

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