UK Government Should End Cruel ‘Two-Child Limit’ Now

Key First Step to Reforming Social Security

Kartik Raj
Senior Researcher,

 Western Europe

HRW

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Children play in a park on a housing estate in Redcar, Teesside, May 17, 2023. © 2023 Joanne Coates/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The United Kingdom Labour Party is about to meet for its annual conference. Now that Labour is in government, with their leader Keir Starmer as prime minister, it should act to strengthen social security, and tackle poverty and inequality. The first concrete step should be immediately ending the cruel “two-child limit” policy.

The “two-child limit” is an arbitrary social security policy introduced by the Conservative government in 2017, in its austerity-motivated shake-up of social security. It cuts off child-related social security support to low-income households after the second child. Larger families are left with fewer resources as their need increases.

The latest official data show that 440,000 families are affected, losing out on £3,455 per child per year. The Labour government has so far refused to scrap the policy, citing fiscal constraints, despite mounting pressure. Evidence shows that the two-child rule is driving increasing child poverty; it is a needless, cruel rule that harms children and society, and should end now.

Repealing the two-child limit should also be the springboard for broader UK social security reform.

The “benefit cap,” established in 2013, is an arbitrary financial limit on the amount of total social security benefits a household can receive, designed to ostensibly reduce reliance on welfare and drive people into employment. It largely hasn’t worked. And absurdly, the benefit cap, affecting 123,000 households, is lower in real and nominal terms today than it was in 2013.

Current levels of social security support are inadequate to meet people’s right to a decent standard of living in the UK. The government should listen to the Guarantee Our Essentials campaign, set up an independent evaluation of the adequacy of social security payment levels, and pass legislation to ensure no one is left below this level.

To demonstrate it takes its human rights obligations seriously, the government should also go a step further and make key programs universal, rather than means-tested.

Labour has committed to a child poverty strategy, reviewing how the Universal Credit social security system works, and enacting a socioeconomic equality duty that was first agreed 14 years ago. These are positives, but do not obviate the need for broader social security policy reform aligned with human rights, starting with immediately ending the two-child limit.