Labour can help fight poverty by removing two-child benefit cap - Susan Dalgety

Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. PIC: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

For the sake of clarity, the benefit cap does not affect Child Benefit, the government allowance payable for every child under 16.

A parent can have a dozen kids and they will get Child Benefit for each one. The two-child cap that has caused so much controversy in recent weeks affects parents who claim child tax credit or universal credit.

They can only get support for their first two children. If they have three or more, tough.

This measure came into force back in 2017, dreamed up by the Tories as part of their austerity programme – in other words, making poor people pay for the mess that bankers and others had made of the economy.

At the time, Labour politicians were quick to criticise the cap, describing it as “vicious”, but when Keir Starmer was campaigning to be Prime Minister, he was adamant it would remain in place if Labour won.

The cost of abolishing the two-child limit, estimated to be between £2.5 and £3.6 billion, was just too high for our fragile economy he argued.

So far he has stuck stubbornly to his promise, as have his MPs.

Last week, all but one of Scotland’s 37 new Labour MPs voted against an SNP amendment to get rid of the measure.

Katrina Murray, the new MP for Cumbernauld, did not vote. The seven Labour MPs who voted for the cap to be scrapped have been suspended from Labour for six months.

But pressure is mounting on Starmer to change his mind. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has said the cap should go, describing it as “heinous”.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has made tackling child poverty his lifetime’s mission, told the BBC recently that the policy is "condemning children to poverty".

And evidence from groups like the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland is compelling – removing the limit would lift 15,000 Scottish children out of poverty and 250,000 across the whole of the UK.

There is no doubt the Tories left the public purse empty and the economy flailing. But for the last 14 years, it is the ordinary people of Britian who have had to pay the price when things go wrong, whether it was Covid-19 or the energy crisis.

The rich have simply got richer, flaunting their wealth while the rest of us struggle to stay afloat.

Families who receive child tax credit or universal credit are not scroungers. They are hard-working families who cannot earn enough to get by or single parents who struggle to find affordable childcare so that they can work.

As one of Labour’s new Scottish MPs, Blair McDougall, said last week, lifting children out of poverty is “what Labour governments do. It’s in our DNA”.

Surely then a simple way to prove Labour’s commitment to tackling poverty would be to remove the two-child cap - or am I missing something?