Suella Braverman has emerged from this weekend with more humanity than a would-be Labour Cabinet minister – well, on one policy at least. The former Home Secretary called for the two-child benefit limit to be scrapped, while shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting backed Labour’s decision to maintain it.
Ironically, in 2016 Braverman voted for the policy, while Streeting voted in line with the Labour whip of then-leader Jeremy Corbyn to oppose it.
The two-child limit, introduced as part of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 under David Cameron, restricts child tax credits and universal credit to the first two children in a family – resulting in much higher poverty rates for larger families. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, children in families of three or more children are twice as likely to be in poverty as those in one or two-child families.
Scrapping the two-child cap would lift 300,000 children out of poverty and nearly halve the increase in child poverty since 2010.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Braverman argues that the policy “is not having the effect of increasing employment or alleviating poverty. Instead, it’s aggravating child poverty”. As predicted by those of us who argued against it at the time – when she voted for it.
Streeting, on the other hand, was asked about this in an interview plugging his new book, which details his upbringing in a single-parent family in east London. “I am a product of a welfare state that quite literally fed me and housed me and clothed me at points in my life,” he said.
Despite this, he added: “I also know that that the answer to child poverty, ultimately, is not simply about handouts, it is about a social security safety net that also acts as a springboard that helps people into work”.
Many of the families affected by the two-child benefit cap are working – universal credit is an in-work benefit too, compensating for the ills of the current labour market: low wages, short-hours contracts and insecure work patterns.
In invoking the individualistic rhetoric of the Tories – “more than just about handouts” – Streeting fails to make the case for social security; that understanding that our society is better and our communities stronger if everyone has a firm foundation in life.
While dismissing calls to scrap the cap, Streeting appealed to history, arguing, “I just ask people to judge Labour on [its] record of lifting a million children … out of poverty under the last Labour government.”
While child poverty did fall for most of New Labour’s period in office (and fell overall), it started to rise in its final term. The New Labour government also inherited strong economic growth, with tax revenues increasing and near full employment. That is not something a Keir Starmer government may inherit as our economy has had a prolonged period of stagnation.
Streeting is seen by many in the party – admirers and detractors alike – as the latter-day flagbearer for Blairism.
What he fails to appreciate is that, in 13 years in office, New Labour never once introduced a two-child benefit cap, or a household benefit cap or the bedroom tax. These are Conservative policies that would have been rejected out-of-hand by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor who personally drove most of Labour’s initiatives to successfully reduce child poverty, from tax credits to Sure Start and the now-abolished Child Trust Fund.
You need good policy to achieve things in government – not airy appeals to nostalgia. So far Labour has set out no policy at all to show how the party would reduce child poverty.
The last Labour manifesto promised to scrap the two-child limit, the household benefit cap, the bedroom tax and to increase local housing allowance. It set out clearly how it would be paid for by increasing taxation on those with the broadest shoulders: the highest earners and corporations.
Labour under Starmer has promised not to increase personal or corporate taxation and so has narrowed its options. Braverman suggested “some form of means testing for pensioners”, which presumably Labour would oppose, and rightly so: pensioners in the UK already receive one of the lowest state pensions in Europe.
In the topsy-turvy world of British politics, perhaps though Braverman has at last served one useful purpose to prompt Labour into action: if not by scrapping the two-child limit, then how will the party reduce child poverty? It is a question every Labour shadow minister should be asked until they can give an answer.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party