In a letter to the Chancellor ahead of next month’s Budget, the six MPs who were suspended over the two-child benefit limit said Labour cannot ‘justify maintaining’ the policy
Six Labour MPs who were suspended over the two-child benefit limit have called on Rachel Reeves to axe the “cruel” policy in full.
In a letter to the Chancellor ahead of next month’s Budget, they said the Labour government cannot “justify maintaining” the policy. Scrapping it would “show that the Labour government is serious about tackling the cost-of-living crisis that leaves millions of families struggling to make ends meet”.
The MPs who have written to Ms Reeves include John McDonnell, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Ian Byrne, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon and Imran Hussain. All have had the whip restored since voting against the government on the issue last summer – just weeks after Labour’s election landslide.
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They said the two-child benefit limit is a “policy that punishes children for the circumstances of their birth and no Labour government can justify maintaining it.” They added: “Every single day that this two-child cap remains in place, more than 100 children are pushed into poverty.
“Abolishing the two-child limit would be the single biggest and most cost-effective measure the Labour Government could take to lift children out of poverty. We therefore call on you to use the November Budget to announce the full abolition of the two-child benefit cap.”
The pressure comes as Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves consider abolishing or watering down the policy introduced by austerity Chancellor George Osborne almost a decade ago. It restricts Child Tax Credits and Universal Credit to the first two children in a family and has been blamed by charities for trapping kids in poverty.
The government is set to publish the work of its child poverty review alongside the Budget, which is expected to include recommendations on the two-child benefit limit. Earlier this week the Resolution Foundation think-tank warned half measures – such as moving to a three-child limit, lower child elements for third and subsequent children – would still leave higher rates of child poverty by the end of the decade.
And Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, who is calling for the policy to be scrapped, hit out at the decision to strip the whip from the MPs who voted against the government last summer. He said on Monday: “That is not what I remember from the Labour government I was in under Brown and Blair – no one lost the whip for taking a principled stance like that.”