End Child Poverty Coalition Manager Rachel Walters and Amanda Bailey, the Director of the North East Child Poverty Commission, argue that the next government should scrap the two-child limit to benefit payments.
Across the UK 4.3 million children are living in poverty. This could mean their parents are having to use food banks to provide food, or they live in cold homes without heating in winter, or they are unable to go on school trips or afford school uniforms. Whilst tackling child poverty might seem like a complex issue involving governmental departments for housing, work, education etc, the first step a new government should immediately take to reduce this figure is simple: scrap the two-child limit to benefit payments.
The two-child limit is a policy introduced to limit the amount of money a family receives in their ‘child element’ from Universal Credit, or child tax credits, to just two children if the third child was born after April 2017. As a result, parents are missing out on just under £3500 each year for every child that doesn’t qualify. We don’t limit access to the NHS to two children per household. Or deny children an education just because they have older siblings. Yet when a family faces tough times, why do we deny a child the support they need to stay fed, housed and healthy, just because they happen to have more than one older brother or sister?
This is the reality for the 1.5 million children impacted by the unfair two-child limit, which is essentially a sibling tax. One in 10 children across the UK lives in a home impacted by this policy. Lifting this limit would pull 300,000 children out of poverty, at a cost of £1.8bn.
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Recent research from Loughborough University, for the End Child Poverty Coalition, showed there is a strong positive correlation between the two-child limit and levels of child poverty. One area where child poverty is particularly widespread is the North East of England, where this research has found that 89% of the region’s General Election constituencies have at least one in four children growing up in poverty.
Whilst many of the councils in that region are working incredibly hard with cross-sector partners to develop and implement local anti-poverty strategies, the scale of the impact of a national policy like the two-child limit is simply impossible for them to mitigate – not least after more than a decade of cuts to their spending power, combined with years of rising need.
In the North East alone, by April 2023 (the latest available figures), there were more than 65,000 babies, children and young people living in families impacted by this policy – equivalent to one in eight of all children growing up in the region. This meant North East families missing out on a collective £67.5m per year in support – money which also wasn’t available to spend with local businesses and shops. Those numbers will have risen further still as more and more families are hit by the policy each year, and no local authority can begin to fill the gap in support – or hit to local economies – that this national policy has created.
Whilst local authorities across the country will be doing what they can to reduce poverty levels in their area, with policies such as the two-child limit in place there really is only so much that can be done. Change is needed from bold leaders in Westminster who understand that keeping families in poverty cannot continue. We cannot let another generation of children grow up in poverty. The next government must scrap the two-child limit to benefit payments.
Check out: NextGov: What the next government should do for children’s services, NextGov: Revitalising local democracy, and UNISON: To whoever forms the next government.
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