Labour is in the middle of a slow-motion U-turn on the two-child benefit cap. Our political editor, Andrew Marr, revealed on last week’s episode of the New Statesman podcast that it was Keir Starmer’s “priority” to reverse the George Osborne-era cut to benefits for third-born children, and there have been similar reports over the bank holiday weekend.
The government’s child poverty taskforce, which was supposed to report in the spring – ahead of the Spending Review and Spring Statement – has been postponed until autumn, supposedly to give the Treasury time to work out how to fund the reversal of the policy.
Labour promised in its manifesto to reduce child poverty in this parliament. It had little chance of achieving this with the two-child limit still in place – it is responsible for hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty. Starmer’s decision not to lift the cap ahead of the 2024 election was a blow to many within the Labour Party, civil society, and families claiming benefits. The issue emerged again once the party entered government, when Labour MPs voting against the cap had the whip removed.
Pressure built yet again in May, when the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown guest edited a special issue of the New Statesman on Britain’s “child poverty epidemic”, setting out the bleak picture of life for nearly five million children in the UK today, and funding ideas to help them.
In his strongest intervention yet, in a podcast and YouTube interview accompanying this issue, Brown told the New Statesman politics podcast that the two-child cap is “cruel”, turns third siblings into “second-class citizens”, and said it has “got to change” – remarks picked up in the press and in the House of Commons.
Much has been reported about the influence of Tony Blair and his policy institute on the current Labour administration, but less has been said of Gordon Brown’s role. He is close to frontbenchers, such as the employment minister Alison McGovern, and was tasked with a commission on rebuilding Britain’s economy when Labour was in opposition – when he was said to have a “direct line” into Starmer’s office. There are reports, for example, that the child poverty taskforce will recommend the return of Sure Start children’s centres: another suggestion Brown made in his New Statesman podcast interview.
Reluctant to be seen as a backseat driver, Brown had avoided politically inconvenient interventions since Labour took power – most notably on the party’s cut to winter fuel allowance, which he introduced as chancellor. As well as on the two-child cap, he has also now spoken out on that subject, suggesting there is “a case for” excluding top-rate taxpayers from the once-universal payments.
The question now is whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves adopts some of his revenue-raising ideas, including a gambling tax, commercial bank levy, and changes to Gift Aid, to help tackle child poverty. Brown told the New Statesman in the same interview that these funding proposals would be possible without “breaking the government’s tax commitments” or “breaking the fiscal rules, which, of course, Rachel Reeves is obviously right to be concerned about”.
[See more: Letter from Wigan]
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