This article references rape.
As a child, Terri White experienced the crushing impact of poverty. Following the dawn of a new Labour government, she writes for GLAMOUR about how the two-child limit on benefits – a policy that prohibits parents from claiming benefits for a third child – stigmatises mothers and pushes families further into poverty.
This two-child limit, she argues, is very much a feminist issue. Read on here…
Last week, during the King’s Speech, I saw the light. King Charles, robed in ermine and velvet, was announcing the 40 bills making up the policy and legislative agenda of our new government. I was momentarily blinded; the light refracted through 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and four giant rubies set into the Imperial State Crown he wore (estimated value: £3-5 billion).
That record number of bills didn’t include the abolition of the welfare state’s most sadistic policy, the two-child limit (or its cousin in cruelty, the benefit cap – both severing the link between the size of a family's need and state support, leading to the often-misused term 'two-child benefit cap'), and as the billion-pound-bling sent my retinas bananas, I heard Keir Starmer’s voice in my head confirming (back in May) that “we are not going to be able to afford to scrap it”.
Not just the single biggest driver of child poverty, but the most cost-effective way out of it – according to the Child Poverty Action Group, abolishing the two-child limit would cost £1.7billion. Or, as it struck me in that moment as I squinted: just half, perhaps even a quarter, of King Charles’ crown.
The two-child limit was introduced in 2017 to deny third children (and beyond) state support of up to £3,455 a year. The policy’s architect, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that poor families had to learn to “cut their cloth” and that the welfare state encouraged “dysfunctional behaviour” (like, er, having kids) and promoted the belief that work was “a mug’s game”. Which is weird, given that 71% of kids in poverty live in working households.
And while it’s now considered by many to be cruel, I’d go further: it’s inhumane (a word that Deputy PM Angela Rayner used to describe it four years ago). And not just classist, but racist and misogynistic – harming our poorest, but also women disproportionately, single mothers, and Black and brown women and children.
The PM has promised “change” – but what does this look like for women and girls?
If Keir Starmer had axed the two-child limit – like the government was lobbied to – he would have lifted 300,000 kids out of poverty entirely and a further 700,000 out of the deepest poverty overnight. A million kids helped, saved, at the cost of one half of one crown in one man’s vast jewellery collection.
After the crown returned to the Tower of London, Keir Starmer was in the Commons, facing an immediate challenge from his own benches. Sarah Owen, MP for Luton North, a constituency with a 45% child poverty rate (child poverty numbers are 4.3 million nationally), asked, “What reassurance can he give us that he’s taking it seriously?”
Then, the following day, came news of four separate amendments laid on the two-child limit. And not just by opposition parties but by Labour MPs, including Zarah Sultana and Kim Johnson. If Keir Starmer had hoped his announcement of a child poverty task force would quell dissent, it didn't appear to have worked.
There will be howls, voices raised at the unfairness of this, and calls for patience to give the PM, his new government, a chance. And I’d normally sympathise, if not raise my voice too. I would.
If the state wasn’t harming our children.
If our country wasn’t seeing increasing child mortality rates.
If last year, child death rates weren’t twice as high in our poorest areas as in our richest.
If death rates weren’t the highest among our Black and Asian children.
If I hadn’t spent my early years in poverty.
I know the desperation that these children live in hour-by-hour, the desperation that saw me, as a small child, eat out of the big bin behind the local chippy. Keir Starmer speaks a lot of dignity, but how much dignity do you think I had as a five- or six-year-old, babe? How much do I have now, stuck with the sense in the very deepest part of me that I’m worth less?
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Time is a privilege kids today do not have, not when they’re living without heating, food, or electricity. When their mums can’t afford knickers or shoes or to get them to school. Things that I’m sure every member of government would insist their child is entitled to. Well, the children of this country are now yours, too, Keir – why are they entitled to less? Why are their mums?
Because this isn’t just about children. Not when the cap was designed to punish kids as a deterrent for their parents. There is a screaming women’s rights issue sitting at the heart of this, one that many of us seem not to hear.
There is much I could point to, but I’ll mention just two things. That this policy interferes with a woman’s right to choose. Or, more specifically, the rights of our poorest women to choose under the threat of hardship. Would we accept women’s bodily autonomy being compromised in any other situation? Would we accept it happening to any other group of women? Or would we stand up and fight for them, with them?
And secondly, the exception to the cap for “non-consensual conception”. Or, as I prefer to call it, “rape and sexual assault”. One you apply for by completing a form with a third-party professional (that you’ve disclosed to). That requires your signature next to the statement, “I can confirm that I am not living with the other biological parent of this child”. AKA your rapist.
And who is the most likely perpetrator of rape against women in this country? Correct! An intimate partner. The partner a woman may still live with. Who she isn’t free to just up and leave when she lives in poverty with her children. Including the one conceived in sexual violence, who’s punished alongside her. For the violence of men. This is what we mean by misogyny.
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So, yeah, I have little patience with being told to “wait”. A wait that the government won’t even give a steer on (beyond saying “growth” must come first). That, last year, Lucy Powell suggested, may not happen until their second term.
Human arguments aside, I could give chapter and verse on the significant societal cost of child poverty, a cost that is set to breach £40bn by 2027-28, but I don’t believe this is a fiscal call. It’s a political choice. Just like the £3 billion a year for Ukraine, the refusal to put the cap back on bankers’ bonuses.
A political choice entirely at odds with the vision Keir Starmer outlined last week, his “determination for everyone in our country, no matter where they started in life, to feel that success belongs to them”.
His government is keeping a policy – well, two actually, with the benefit cap – that deliberately cut off the prospects of children at conception. Punishes them for the circumstances in which they were born. Impacts their physical and mental health, education and life prospects. Traps them in poverty before they even recognise their own reflection in a mirror. And to pretend anything else is pure fantasy.
An ambitious, big-picture strategy for poverty is absolutely needed. But without the urgent bare minimum of abolishing the two-child limit (and its outsize impact), it’ll be using a single bucket with a hole in it to bail out the Titanic.
While figures released ten days ago showed that 1 in 9 kids now live in a household impacted by the two-child limit, it’ll be 1 in 5 when it's fully rolled out. By this time, 43% of kids in Bangladeshi or Pakistani-origin families will be affected, and an additional 670,000 kids will be pushed into poverty just by this policy. Do you think it’s bleak today? Baby, you’ve seen nowt yet.
A political choice. One that stains our humanity. That we have to contend with – economically, morally, to the very limits of our soul as a country. This is the chance to prove that we’re not lost. Well, are we?
“The British people have voted for change.”
