THE two child cap on benefits, whereby families don’t get extra benefits if they have more than two children, is not right. For one reason, it is the children who are penalised for the sins of their parents, and that cannot be fair.
Removing the cap would cost £1.7bn and raise 330,000 children out of poverty while also benefitting up to 1.6m children who live in affected families. There is no other policy on the table that would be so cost-effective in addressing child poverty, which was one of the main items on The Northern Echo’s manifesto that was presented to all politicians during the election.
However, Labour was crystal clear during the campaign that it would not be able to find the money to remove the cap immediately, so the seven Labour MPs who voted for an SNP motion calling for the cap to be scrapped knew they were stepping out of line and were likely to be disciplined.
They need to give Sir Keir Starmer a chance to work this out, while also keeping the pressure on him from inside the tent.
In his first couple of weeks in office, he has set up a child poverty unit which will report to a ministerial taskforce. The unit will have to address the cap in some way, and then the party leadership, pushed by the vast majority of Labour MPs who want the cap scrapped, will have to react.
There is politics being played by both Sir Keir and the left-wing rebels.
But the most important goal is to get policies introduced quickly that start to cut child poverty – and we believe that that will probably include removing the cap. However, it is hard to see how the rebels’ self-sacrifice has made that goal easier to obtain.
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