Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been urged to scrap the two-child benefit cap by senior faith leaders, including the Church of England’s current top bishop
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been urged to scrap the two-child benefit cap by senior faith leaders, including the Church of England’s current top bishop.
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said the failure to tackle child poverty was “deeply shaming for us as a nation” and said the two-child limit was “one of the contributing factors”. He backed suggestions by former prime minister Gordon Brown to back gambling tax reforms and a levy on banks to fund efforts to ease poverty.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson admitted she was “ashamed” of child poverty levels in this country. She told the Sunday Mirror “all measures” will be considered as part of its child poverty strategy this autumn as she faces calls to scrap the benefit limit.
The Archbishop of York told Sky News’ Sunday with Trevor Phillips: “It is simply a shameful scandal that in a wealthy country like ours, there are children every day – I mean, thousands of children every day – going to school hungry.
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“They don’t have a proper mattress to sleep on, have all the stigma and the life-limiting impacts of poverty. It shouldn’t be this way, which I know everyone agrees on.” He added: “We know that the two-child limit is one of the contributing factors to growing child poverty.”
Other faith leaders have signed an open letter calling on the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to scrap the two-child limit. The group of 38 senior figures from different faiths, including former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Rowan Williams, said: “It is hard to conceive of an effective child poverty strategy that does not act on the restrictive benefit cap and end the two-child limit.
“Faith groups have challenged the limit on moral grounds, rejecting the state’s abandonment of third and later children, and the poverty this inevitably causes.”
Ms Phillipson told Sky News: “I’m ashamed of the very high numbers of children growing up in poverty that we see in our country.” She said that bringing that level down was “what I came into politics to do” and pointed to the expansion of taxpayer-funded childcare, free school meals and breakfast clubs in England.
Asked whether the Government would lift the two-child benefit limit she said: “We’re looking at every way that we can lift more children out of poverty. That does extend to social security measures alongside that. It’s not the only way we can lift children out of poverty, and of course, it does come with a big price tag, but we know that not acting also comes with serious consequences and impact too.”
The Government’s promised child poverty strategy was originally expected in the spring but it is now due to be published in the autumn. Ms Phillipson said the two-child benefit limit would be considered in the strategy, telling the Sunday Mirror: “We are looking at all measures, including social security measures.
“Of course, they come with a big price tag, and that is challenging because of the wider state of the public finances that we inherited. But the two-child limit was not introduced by a Labour government. It’s not something that we would have done.”
The two-child cap was first announced in 2015 by the Conservatives and came into effect in 2017. It restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Alex Burghart doubled down on his party’s policy.
Asked whether he felt “ashamed” after the Archbishop of York’s comments on the two-child limit, he replied: “No, absolutely not. I think that people who are on benefits should have to face the same choices as people who are in work.
“I don’t think that an incredibly expensive extension to the welfare system is what the British people want or can afford at this moment in time. But even outside of that, I think in principle, we shouldn’t just be endlessly extending welfare.”
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, which has pledged to scrap the two-child benefit limit if it is elected, said: “We want a child benefit system that encourages more British families, more British births, because we’ve got a demographic problem at the moment.
“But equally, we need a welfare system that gets people back into work and stops people making the lifestyle choice of essentially deciding not to work.”
But he would not say how he would pay for the move as he would not set a policy “for a Budget in four years time after the next general election that we win”.
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