‘It’s put so many families into poverty’: People question impact of capping two-child benefit | Benefits

Keir Starmer has launched a cross-government taskforce to tackle child poverty, but Labour backbenchers are calling on the government to go further and scrap the two-child benefit cap. Here, people reveal how the limit is affecting their families.

Alicia* is a mother of four in Newcastle who is separated from their father. She does everything she can to avoid picking up a parcel from a food bank. She often buys a big bag of potatoes and cooks them in different ways throughout the week – jacket potatoes, chips, wedges – so her children have variety. She often skips breakfast and lunch herself.

“I stay empty all day,” she says, because going to the food bank, which she started last August, makes her feel ashamed, as if she is “worthless as a mother.”

Last Wednesday, Alicia was running low on cash, so she went to the food pantry to pick up a package: rolls, fresh apples and oranges that were close to their expiration date, potatoes and juice, diapers and baby wipes. At the food bank, she tries to get in and out quickly, “hiding my face so other parents don’t recognize me.”

“I don’t care, I don’t want my children to be judged at school.”

Alicia is one of several people who spoke to the Guardian after responding to an online appeal about the impact of the two-child benefit limit on their families.

Because Alicia’s two youngest children were born after 6 April 2017, they are affected by the two-child child benefit cap: a measure introduced by the Conservative government that prevents parents from claiming Child Tax Credit or Universal Credit for any third or more children born after that date. Alicia receives £621.25 a month for her first two children, but nothing for her youngest two. The measure costs families like hers £3,455 a year per child. Last year, around 450,000 households and 1.6 million children were affected, according to the latest official figures.

The SNP tabled an amendment to the King’s Speech to remove the two-child benefit cap, which received cross-party support from the Green Party, SDLP, Plaid Cymru, Alliance Party and independent MPs including Jeremy Corbyn.

According to the Child Poverty Action Group, removing the cap would cost around £1.7bn, or around 0.14% of total public spending in 2024-25, and lift 300,000 children out of poverty.

With four growing children, Alicia has to “juggle what clothes she’s going to buy” within her monthly budget. Currently unemployed, when the kids go to bed, Alicia applies for jobs. She struggles to find a job that fits her children’s needs – the two youngest only get 15 hours of funded childcare per week.

“Labour should scrap the two-child limit because it is unfair and is pushing many families into child poverty,” says Alicia.

In St Helens, Merseyside, Angelica has four children and lives with her husband. She receives Universal Credit for her three eldest children, aged 18, 12 and nine, but not for her six-year-old because they were born after the measure was introduced. Angelica says the two-child benefit cap is “shameful” and a “symbol of discrimination” which she says undermines children’s human rights.

Angelica explains that her responsibilities to her nine-year-old son, who is autistic, mean the family has to pay for car maintenance and buy special groceries – expenses that have contributed to Angelica’s family falling into debt. Her husband now works two jobs to help pay off his debts.

She says people think poverty is a 19th century phenomenon or a Charles Dickens novel, but fail to see that “it still exists.”

Jane, 41, a mother of two boys aged 10 and seven from Sheffield, remembers the day she received a leaflet about the two-child cap, with a picture of a smiling family of four. The leaflet’s jovial tone “came as a real slap in the face”.

Jane, herself one of three children, and her husband had always imagined raising three children. “It’s nice to have three little faces in the back of the car,” she says. But financial hardships from lack of support and the high cost of daycare, as well as other factors such as a difficult birth, led the couple to make the difficult decision not to have another child.

“I felt like welcoming a third child was a hostile environment,” Jane says.

Katherine and her husband, who live in the South East with two children, aged 17 and 13, were also faced with a difficult choice: after Katherine’s contraception failed and she conceived a third child in 2020, their financial difficulties and the prospect of no additional support were a major factor in the termination of the pregnancy.

After running into financial trouble a few years ago, Katherine says she and her husband, who works for the municipality, were forced to resort to a food bank and sell belongings and furniture. She was nervous to relive this.

“It wasn’t an easy decision to make. I feel like we both wanted to have this child,” she said. “He’s going to be with us forever.”

This took a toll on her mental health. After terminating her pregnancy, Katherine sometimes internalised her feelings and felt “like a failure”. It was only when she read the data on why women have abortions in the UK (one survey found that 57% of women cite financial pressures as a major reason for abortions) that she realised the scale of the problem.

“Why, in the 21st century, in a rich country, do people struggle to have children?” asks Katherine, who has been in rent arrears this year. “It shouldn’t be like this… I hope Labour can govern with a more humane approach and end the two-child limit.”

* Names have been changed upon request to protect anonymity.