My Lords, this Government believe that the UK should be a country where every person has the opportunity to fulfil their potential. That is why we are so committed to removing the barriers that stop people thriving and becoming all that they can be. Doing this will benefit not just the individuals, it will benefit our country. So I am delighted to be here today to move Second Reading of the Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill. It makes a major contribution to tackling the poverty that limits children’s chances in life, and often for life.
There are now four and a half million children in poverty—900,000 more than there were in 2010. To put that in context, if we picture a classroom of 30 children, at the moment around 10 of them will be living in poverty. Some 2 million of our children are in deep material poverty, lacking the basic essentials such as a warm home or healthy food—things without which no child should be growing up. It is shocking enough that so many of our children have to live through childhood like that, but it is even more shocking when we consider the hugely detrimental consequences that growing up in poverty has on children’s health, education and future employment prospects.
Just one in four children in families with the lowest incomes gets good GCSEs. As adults, those who grew up in poverty are more likely to be unemployed or to find themselves in low-skilled, lower-paid jobs. Those who grow up poor clearly do not lack talent; what they lack is opportunity. As a result, our country is missing out on their gifts and their contributions. We are determined to break this link between children’s backgrounds and their future success. That is why, since coming into office, we have taken significant steps to help families tackle poverty and give every child the best start in life: increasing the minimum wage, expanding free school meals for over half a million children, investing in social and affordable housing, and funding more Best Start Family Hubs. We are now pulling the single most cost-effective lever available: removing the universal credit two-child limit, which will lift 450,000 children out of poverty.
This is the right move to extend opportunity, and it is right because our system should not be penalising so many of our children for the circumstances of their birth—circumstances their parents may not have chosen or expected. Life is unpredictable, and crisis can hit anyone regardless of the choices they have made or the size of their family. Marriages break up; parents lose their jobs or get sick, or injured, or die.
That unpredictability is reflected in the fact that half the families who will benefit from lifting the two-child limit were not on universal credit when they had any of their children. These are people who found themselves in need of help after decisions about family size had been taken. It simply is not right to draw dividing lines in the way the two-child limit sought to do, especially when over half the families affected by the two-child limit are already in work, and, of those who are not working, a significant number are affected by serious health conditions or caring responsibilities.
My Lords, I too am pleased to contribute to this important debate and look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Baronesses, Lady Antrobus and Lady Teather, and the noble Lord Walker of Broxton. We welcome these wonderful people to our House and look forward to their contributions.
I feel I must set the scene and set it out very clearly. I say from the outset that we on the Opposition Benches do not support this Bill; in fact, we oppose it. That does not mean in any way that we do not care about children and families—quite the contrary. We believe there are other ways to support them that mean that money can be used differently to achieve the objective of improving their lives. I state publicly that I respect the consistency and tenacity of the Minister and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in their campaigning in this area. We respect it. We may not agree with it, but we give credit where it is due.
We are far from alone in opposing the Bill. On this question, we stand with a clear majority of the British public. Polling consistently shows that more than 60% of people in this country support retaining the two-child benefit cap, with that support stretching across voters of all major political parties. What this debate increasingly appears to be about is not responsible public policy but political party management. As events over the past year have made clear, this measure is not being brought forward because the public have demanded it. Indeed, they are clearly opposed to it. We should all pause and consider why hard-working taxpayers are being asked to shoulder the financial consequences of the Government’s inability to manage their parliamentary party. That is not responsible government; it is a deeply troubling response from the Government to unrest.
Many across this Chamber will have their own principles and reasons for opposing this policy, but I begin with a simple illustration of what this policy and this debate mean in practice. Let us take the London Borough of Hackney. There, 29% of children live in households affected by the two-child limit without an exemption—the highest proportion anywhere in the country. As of August last year, there were 92 households in Hackney on universal credit with five or more children where the youngest child was born after the 2017 cut-off date. Unless they qualify for one of the limited exemptions, those households fall within the scope of the two-child limit. In other words, they already receive less than the maximum universal credit they would otherwise be entitled to. Yet even with the cap in place, these households receive on average £5,152 per month in universal credit. That is more than the take-home pay of someone earning around £88,000 a year. Across the country, the welfare bill for five-child households within the scope of the cap is already around £720 million per year. That is with the two-child limit still in place.
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech here during this Second Reading debate. Supporting children and tackling the impact of poverty and disadvantage have been core themes of my work, both in the other place and in my charity and NHS board roles since.
I will turn to the substance of the Bill in a moment and say some personal words about myself at the close. First, I hope noble Lords will indulge me in offering some heartfelt thanks. I am indebted to the many people who have guided me so patiently in my first few weeks. Having done my apprenticeship at the other end, this place is at once both familiar and very different. I am still navigating by reference to glimpses of green carpet that border red, meaning getting anywhere is taking me twice as long as it should.
I am particularly grateful to Black Rod’s team and to the doorkeepers, who made heroic efforts to support my husband, who is a wheelchair user, at my introduction, as they have today. He is here to listen, along with my parents, and I am very grateful to them for being here. I thank the clerks, the Lord Speaker, the attendants and my supporters—my noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lady Kramer—and the youthful staff team in the Lib Dem Whips Office, who are a daily source of facts, sanity and humour.
The Bill is hugely welcome. While some might say that it is not before time, I want instead to recognise the work done by the Minister in this House—the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock—and the Secretary of State in the other place to bring this Bill forward. I served as Children and Families Minister, and I recall the uphill task of co-ordinating child poverty strategy across departmental silos and coalition “differences of opinion” as somewhere between cat herding and global hostage negotiation—skills that might yet come in handy if we end up in protracted ping-pong here.
I am strongly of the view that the removal of the two-child limit in universal credit is the right thing to do. I have always been a sceptic about arbitrary caps in welfare policy, which seem often to be performative rather than strategic. People are made vulnerable when policy cannot flex for the complexity of real life. More than 1.5 million children are currently affected by the two-child limit, denied what they need to thrive and growing up where hunger, cold and uncertainty are daily realities; missing opportunities to join school trips and activities; and leaving them more likely to be bullied at school—something I know from my most recent role leading a children’s charity dedicated to that cause. Poverty affects children in every community, which was the premise behind targeted support through the pupil premium, but this two-child limit falls on regions unevenly and disproportionately on families from Black and ethnic-minority communities, baking in inequality and damaging life chances for decades.
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Teather’s eloquent maiden speech, and I congratulate her on it and welcome her thoughtful remarks. In her speech, her expertise and experience as a former Minister for Children and Families shone through, and her long-term commitment to work with charities and the NHS show her deep understanding of poverty in all its forms, particularly for refugees. I am sure we in this Chamber will very much welcome her experience and insight to the work we do here, particularly at this challenging time. I also pay tribute to her effective campaigning, having founded the APPG on Guantanamo Bay and chaired the APPG on Refugees when she was an MP. I am sure she is going to make valuable contributions to the work of this House as an enthusiastic and energetic colleague. Her voice will certainly be heard here, I am confident of that. It is a great pleasure to welcome her to these Benches; I wish her further success in the future and in her career in this House.
As we consider the Bill before us today, it is important to recognise the deeply egregious effects it seeks to remedy. The two-child limit is unjust and unfair and is a major driver of child poverty. It is discriminatory and hits hardest those who have the least and suffer the most, punishing children and setting siblings’ interests against one another within families. Some 25% of families affected are single parents with a child under three years old. Children of these families are doubly disadvantaged, having only one parent who is fully employed trying to make ends meet. Some 20% of all households affected by the two-child limit have at least one disabled child and 87,500 families affected lose around £3,500 per year.
Behind these figures, the reality of child poverty is about deprivation and misery. As a former teacher, I have seen it all too often: hungry children finding concentration in school impossible; teachers feeding the most desperate from their own pockets; parents missing meals so their children can eat; children and parents who have never known a holiday; the grinding anxiety and stress of trying to make meagre funds stretch even further and, quite honestly, just never having enough money. The humiliation and stigma of being poor compared to classmates and friends too often ends up in children being bullied in and out of school, for the old, cold and worn-out clothes that single out the poor or for not being able to go on school trips and visits or join sports and leisure clubs because your family simply cannot afford it. All this leads to a lack of confidence, feelings of inferiority and isolation, and subsequent poor attainment. It means that, by the age of 30, those who grew up poor are likely to be earning about 25% less than their peers. They are four times more likely to experience mental health problems, with growing consequences for worklessness and the benefits bill. They are more likely not to be in education, employment or training. I wonder whether the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, thinks this is a route out of poverty; I certainly do not.
My Lords, I warmly welcome the introduction of the Bill and the opportunity today to comment on it. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, on her truly excellent maiden speech, and I look forward to the maiden contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Antrobus, and the noble Lord, Lord Walker, as well as of other noble Lords.
I count myself very fortunate to have never experienced true poverty myself, but I have spent much of my working life living in communities where poverty was very real—both the absolute poverty of one of the poorest nations in Africa, where I worked for several years, and the relative poverty of inner-city Sheffield, where I was vicar for a decade before becoming Bishop of Leicester.
I have seen first-hand, therefore, that poverty is not just about material resources but also has a much wider psychosocial impact. Amartya Sen argued that poverty should be understood not as low income but as capability deprivation: the lack of real freedom or opportunities to live a life one has reason to value. Martha Nussbaum expanded Sen’s framework by proposing a list of central human capabilities—such as life, bodily health, imagination, emotion, affiliation, play, and control over one’s environment—which all societies should secure for every citizen as a matter of justice.
Added to this is what some have called the poverty-shame nexus: the mutually reinforcing relationship between material hardship and the emotional experience of shame. People in poverty can experience shame through various mechanisms: social stigma, being judged as lazy, undeserving, or morally inferior; institutional interactions—for example, public services that treat people disrespectfully; or cultural norms that define success and worth in material terms. Research has found that people internalise stigmatising narratives about poverty and, as a result, have lower self-esteem and self-worth, and avoid social interaction with others.
My Lords, I thank you for the opportunity to make my maiden speech in this important debate on this universal credit Bill and the removal of the two-child benefit limit. This matter is personal to me. When I was 11 years old, state help in the form of child benefit became incredibly important to my single-parent household after my parents separated. My weekly trek to the post office to collect it—in cash, of course, in those days—helped us through a difficult period. Quite simply, it put food on our table. Mine was a middle-class family, and those who rely on support such as universal credit are not a static group, as has been said. Circumstances change: people face bereavement, job loss, or, as in my case, family breakdown. At moments of crisis, that support can be essential.
In fact, both my parents worked in this place as law reporters before the Law Lords moved to the Supreme Court. At no time did anybody imagine I would end up on these Benches. That I have joined the Labour Benches is probably less of a surprise. I have a proud heritage of Labour councillors from my grandparents’ generation, including the chair of Newton-le-Willows District Council, then part of Lancashire: my great uncle, Joe Noon. He taught me to play dominoes and to respect my Labour heritage, and he succeeded in both.
I also give heartfelt thanks to all the staff of the House, the clerks, officials, security and catering staff, and especially the doorkeepers, whose quiet professionalism sustains the dignity and daily functioning of this institution. I also thank Black Rod for his warm welcome and Garter for his guidance. I am deeply grateful to my noble friends Lady Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Coaker for introducing me, and to my noble friends Lady Smith of Basildon and Lord Kennedy of Southwark, not only for their generosity in time of support but for the confidence they placed in me.
I come to this House with a background that spans practice and theory, service and scholarship. For 20 years, I served in the Royal Air Force, including operational tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and in the Royal Navy. Those experiences shaped how I understand conflict—not as an abstract concept, but as something that has lifelong and often multigenerational impacts, both on combatants and civilians. Those conflicts still haunt me in many ways, but they also strengthen my determination to engage with politics in relation to defence and security. I wanted to walk towards that fight, not away from it, including standing as a candidate for the Labour Party in the 2015 general election, after I left the Air Force.
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the wonderful maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Antrobus, which came from both the heart and the head—there is no better combination. As she said, she comes to your Lordships’ House with a background that spans practice and theory, service and scholarship. She is too modest to say just how eminent her record has been in all those spheres. Her speech demonstrates how valuable her contribution will be to the work of this House, at a time when conflict is engulfing so much of the world. I very much look forward to the wisdom that she will bring to debates on these matters.
My noble friend was also able to bring her personal experience of growing up in a single-parent family to bear on the subject of today’s debate. In doing so, she demonstrated the value of the knowledge that comes from lived experience—something that has helped to shape the Government’s child poverty strategy. She brought home very powerfully why it is wrong to suggest that the money spent on the abolition of the two-child limit would be better spent on defence, as the leader of the Opposition said recently. My noble friend’s speech made it clear how the security of the realm and the security of individuals in poverty are intertwined.
This brings me to the Bill. Let us rejoice as we read the death rites on what one eminent social policy professor described as the “worst social policy ever”. As we have heard, what UNICEF UK describes as a “transformative” measure will reduce both the numbers of children in poverty and the depths of poverty. As one mother responded, “Finally all my children will be seen as equals”. I pay tribute to those in government and in civil society who made sure it happened.
The Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner recently observed that,
“without this step, it would be difficult to imagine an effective overall approach to combating child poverty. It is an important investment in the rights and wellbeing of children”.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for introducing this Bill. Her passion for this policy is evident and I am sure that she is very glad finally to bring it to us 615 days after the current Government took power. The Green Party called for the end of the two-child benefit cap during the 2024 election and has continued to do so subsequently.
As the noble Baroness said, this policy was introduced by the Cameron-Osborne Conservative Government in 2017, deliberately choosing to put children into poverty—children who had done nothing to deserve that situation. It was a cruel policy and it is very good news that it is finally going. I offer congratulations to the many campaigners who have worked for this day, including Labour Back-Benchers in the other place. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who, I have no doubt, has been working very hard on this and rightly identified where the Government urgently need to go further, which is where I will particularly focus.
This is a missed opportunity, as it fails to act on the household benefit cap. According to Z2K, the charity that aims to fight poverty, at least 150,000 children in larger families will see no benefit at all because they are subject to that separate benefit cap. The household benefit cap means that many larger families will be trapped in deep poverty. In a case study cited by Z2K, Maryam is a lone parent of three who fled domestic abuse and now relies on universal credit. She has been affected by the two-child benefit limit and the benefit cap and is left with just £25 a week for the family to live on after rent. Even with today’s Bill, her income will not increase at all. If the benefit cap was lifted alongside it, it would allow her to meet her basic living costs and escape severe destitution.
There are also the families affected by disability. The Government’s child poverty strategy highlights that children living in families where a household member is disabled are at particularly high risk of both poverty and deep material poverty. Yet, under the changes in the universal credit legislation, financial support for seriously ill and disabled people under universal credit will be reduced by £215 a month. For a disabled family with three children affected by this, that universal credit change will wipe out 62% of the benefits from the two-child limit abolition. Policy in Practice, which did some very valuable work, found that one in 10 households currently held back by the two-child limit will not gain at all when the policy is reversed and one in 10 families will see only part of their potential gain as they become benefit-capped through the policy.
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Illness, disability, bereavement, unemployment, becoming a carer—these things can hit any one of us, and have probably hit many of us in this Chamber already. Our welfare state exists to pool risk, to give all of us some protection from the impact of life’s slings and arrows. Some will look only at the cost, without looking at the cost of failing to offer support. We simply cannot afford to sit on our hands and wait for the costs of poverty to spiral. Without intervention, 150,000 more children will be pulled into poverty by 2030. That is 150,000 stories of missed opportunity, of deeper inequality, of lost productivity. But if tackling poverty is vital not just for the lives and opportunities of children, it is vital for our economy. Every pound we spend lifting children out of poverty saves so much more in future health, education and social security costs.
Few investments will reap rewards as great as investing in the next generation, in our future workforce. Failing to act on child poverty will cost Britain far more than investing now. That is why removing the two-child limit is part of our wider child poverty strategy. We committed in our manifesto to making good work the foundation of our approach to tackling poverty. Parents are doing all they can to support their children. Parental employment rates are already high but, with almost three-quarters of children in poverty being in a working family, too many parents find themselves in jobs where they are still struggling to support their families.
Meanwhile, too many of those who are not in work face barriers to entering the labour market, whether that is down to health, disability, a lack of childcare, poor skills, public transport not working in their area, or all kinds of other barriers. We want every parent who can work to feel the benefits of secure, rewarding jobs that enable them to get on in life, to support their families and to set an example to the next generation. That is why we will deliver a step change in employment and skills support for parents, helping them to balance work and caring responsibilities through high-quality, flexible jobs and improving access to affordable childcare.
The expansion of childcare comes alongside other measures in our child poverty strategy to drive down working poverty, including raising the minimum wage and creating more secure jobs by strengthening rights at work. The measures in the strategy will lift 550,000 children out of poverty. These interventions will lead to the largest expected reduction in child poverty over a Parliament since comparable records began. Together, all this represents a strong start. It kick-starts action and ambition over the next 10 years, responding to the immediate pressures families face now while delivering change to fix the structural drivers of child poverty.
But we do not underestimate the scale of the challenge: to build a society where every child grows up safe, warm and well fed, not held back by poverty but helped forward by government. So we will monitor our progress using two main metrics. First, we will use the internationally recognised and well-established “relative low income after housing costs” measure to monitor overall child poverty. Secondly, there will be a new measure of deep material poverty, which we have developed to assess families’ ability to afford the essentials. This takes account not just of their income but of the cost of essentials, their overall financial situation and the support they receive locally. It is not just the number of children in poverty that matters; it is the depth of that poverty too.
We are committed to ensuring that removing the two-child limit, along with other measures in the child poverty strategy, delivers the results children need and deserve. To support this, we have published a monitoring and evaluation framework alongside the strategy. That sets out how we will track our progress and the success of these policies, as part of an ongoing commitment to transparency, accountability and continued learning. This includes focused analysis to understand what drives child poverty and the impacts of the changes we are making, so that we can build on our successes and continue to make the case for further intervention. We will publish a baseline report in the summer setting out the latest statistics and evidence, with annual reports thereafter to monitor and evaluate progress.
This Government will not stand by while millions of children face the long-term harm that poverty brings. Families in poverty cannot afford to give their children what they need to grow and to achieve their potential. We will boost family incomes through employment and social security, drive down the cost of essentials and strengthen local support services. We are investing in the future of our children and will hold ourselves to account on delivering the impact we promised through this Parliament and beyond. We will remove this cruel policy, which has pushed 300,000 children into poverty.
I look forward very much to this debate and especially to the maiden speeches of my noble friends Lady Antrobus and Lord Walker of Broxton and the noble Baroness, Lady Teather. Between them they bring an amazing wealth and breadth of experience and knowledge to our House. I am delighted that they have chosen this extremely important Bill to make their first contribution to our proceedings. I beg to move.
Set that against the reality faced by many working families. In Hackney and communities across the country, there are parents in work earning far less than that level of take-home pay who would love nothing more than to have a third child. But they sit down at the kitchen table, look at the household finances and make the heartbreaking decision that they simply cannot afford it. At the very same time, their taxes are funding households down the road who receive an income from universal credit that, in effect, exceeds their own. If this cap is removed, those households will not face the same choices about how many children they can afford.
I ask the Minister a simple question: how can that possibly be fair? How can it be right that working people supporting our economy and paying the taxes that fund the system must carefully limit the size of their own families while being asked to fund a system in which those not in work face no such constraint? That is the fundamental question of fairness at the heart of this debate, and it is why a clear majority of the public vehemently support the cap.
There is a wider point about economic development. More than this, what separates us on these Benches from the Minister and her Back Benches is our view that a handout is not the same as a hand up. The evidence is clear that the most effective way to tackle poverty is to provide people with the means and the incentives to provide for themselves. The single biggest factor in a child’s life chances is whether parents work, and removing the cap reduces the incentives to work altogether. That is clearly not a route out of poverty. Of course support should be targeted at those who need it—we have no argument with that—but it should not create a model where households on benefits are rewarded in a way no working family ever would be. That undermines both fairness and the incentive to work. As I have said, work is the only meaningful way that we will solve the problem of child poverty in the medium and long term.
When the incentive in place is to get more on benefits than working, why would you go to work? I am concerned by the view expressed by Labour Back-Benchers and the Government that increasing the generosity of the welfare offer in some way solves the issue of poverty. This approach does nothing but provide a sticking plaster to mask the fact that a dramatically increasing number of people rely solely on the state for their subsistence. This comes at a major and increasing cost to those who work and contribute, as the Spring Statement disturbingly underscored when it revealed that welfare spending will rise by 5.8% this year to an absolutely staggering £330 billion—around 11% of GDP.
My party has been clear. We would reinstate the two-child cap. Only last week my right honourable friend, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of our party, set out why. The savings from this policy could be redirected toward one of the more fundamental responsibilities of any Government—the protection and defence of the realm. Again, I stress that it does not mean that we do not care about children and families, but those savings would allow the recruitment of 20,000 additional soldiers and fund the accommodation, equipment and support they need to do their jobs properly at a time when the demands on our Armed Forces are growing and the world is becoming more uncertain. That is a central priority.
After the extraordinary spectacle of recent weeks, when the world has seen the Government unable and unwilling to defend British sovereign territory, the case for properly funding our Armed Forces has become more urgent than ever. Our defence should not be an afterthought. It should be the first duty of the state.
That is why it is so troubling that money that could be strengthening our national defence is instead being spent to manage the Government’s internal policies and politics. The country is being asked to foot the bill not because the policy case has been won but because the Government and the Chancellor have chosen not to pursue the welfare reforms they themselves once supported because they are too weak to get them past their own MPs. Do His Majesty’s Government have any plans to review the welfare state and to change it to a system that incentivises people to work, rather than live permanently on benefits? The defence of the nation should always come before the management of the governing party but, unfortunately, the policy we are discussing today is a manifestation of just that.
Ultimately, this debate comes down to three simple principles: fairness, responsibility and the Government’s priorities. It is about fairness, because it cannot be right that working families who get up every day, pay their taxes and carefully weigh what they can and cannot afford for their own children, are asked to fund a system in which those same choices do not apply. A welfare system that loses sight of that basic sense of fairness will quickly lose the confidence of the people who sustain it. It is about responsibility, because tackling poverty cannot mean simply writing even larger checks from the state. Real and lasting progress comes from helping people into work, strengthening incentives and ensuring that welfare is a safety net, not a substitute for independence. A system that blurs that distinction ultimately fails the very people it claims to help. It is about priorities, because every £1 spent by the state is a £1 taken from taxpayers and other priorities. At a time of enormous pressure on the public finances and growing threats in the world around us, the Government must be honest about where those resources should go.
This Bill fails on all three counts. It weakens fairness, it risks entrenching dependency rather than tackling its causes and it diverts scarce resources away from the fundamental duties of government. For those reasons, and in the interest of fairness and sound policy, these Benches cannot support the Bill. We urge the Government to keep the cap; it is what the country wants and what the country needs. I know the Benches opposite will not agree with me one little bit—I am under no illusions about that. I remind the whole House that you cannot make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor and you cannot help the wage earner by punishing the wage payer.
Removing the two-child limit will make an impact on hundreds of thousands of children. But in the spirit of a maiden speech, I suggest gently that mitigation of its forerunner, the benefit cap, which interacts with the high cost of rented housing, might also be needed. This might be, for example, by reviewing the cap annually in line with the cost of living or disregarding child benefit from the total.
I want to say something about language and narrative. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s UK poverty report this year describes the impact of an increasingly toxic public debate on those living in poverty, saying that the
“values of compassion, justice and equity … are too often missing”.
Stigma and scapegoating really matter. Money fills the electric meter, buys the school uniform and pays for breakfast, but it is language that limits expectations, hardens attitudes and severs relationships.
I spent most of my decade-long civilian sabbatical away from politics leading a UK charity in the refugee sector, the Jesuit Refugee Service. I learned much at JRS about the way destitution and homelessness eat away at dignity, but also about the transformative power of relationships and community. Towards the end of my time at the charity, we started a new project to train staff in mediation skills, encouraging them to listen and engage in conversations locally and to learn from people with different, even opposing perspectives about our work. It was experimental in form, but the othering that we had witnessed had been so devastating that we were convinced that we must not contribute to it further.
Our potential to create change and solve problems in this polarised age depends on how well we collaborate with people who do not always share our worldview—resisting the urge to stereotype and being open to the idea that working with people we do not agree with might yield new solutions. One of the great joys of my first few weeks here has been the warm and fascinating conversations with noble Lords from different parties. This cross-party opportunity is a seam that I hope to mine.
I finish my remarks by sharing with noble Lords something very personal. I have spent most of my adult life working with and for people who are sidelined—those who struggle to get their voices heard and their experiences understood. Then, four years ago, I suddenly lost my voice. A random neurological hit knocked out a nerve to my vocal cords, leaving me struggling to speak. It took two years of speech and language therapy at Guy’s Hospital and specialist voice rehab to teach my body to adapt to this state and return a singing and useful voice—help for which I am deeply grateful.
The words of the Letters Patent read by the clerk at our introduction to this House confer on each of us a voice in this place. I understand the privilege of this gift—it is something that my body knows to be true. So I pledge to use my voice here to create space for all those whose voices continue to be silenced and whose experiences are missing from our deliberations. I hope to use my voice to enjoy as many cross-party conversations and collaborations as tea in the Long Room will sustain.
This pernicious policy was justified by the previous Government on the basis that it would make parents claiming benefits face the same financial choices as those supporting themselves through work. The argument was that the policy would achieve fairness. However, such evidence as there is points entirely to the contrary. No evidence has been produced to show that the policy has achieved its declared objectives. If the previous Government did not produce that evidence, I fail to see how those who were part of it can stand up and defend it.
Half the families who will benefit from the removal of the two-child limit, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has said, were not on benefits when they had children, but catastrophes happen to families. People lose their jobs or become ill; families break up; people die or family members need extra care. This is why we have social security, as these misfortunes do not happen just to the poor; they happen to us all. Based on the arguments that the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, has put, only a household wealthy enough to withstand all life’s disasters could responsibly decide to have more than two children.
It has been argued that the two-child limit will encourage families to increase their income by finding more work, but, for many, especially lone parents, the difficulty of finding affordable childcare means that they cannot increase working hours but need to make their meagre income go even further. All too often, it is their children who suffer. Expert institutions have attributed the rising tide of child poverty to the two-child limit policy. Some 59% of families affected by the two-child limit are in work, so, again, the false dichotomy between people having children on benefits and people at work does not stand up here.
Abolition of the two-child limit has been a common cause between many Members of this House and campaigners outside Parliament. I pay tribute to those who have worked to get this policy changed, and I very much hope the Bishop of Durham is listening, because he, too, was a key campaigner on this.
It is good to see that action is now being taken to remove this policy through the Bill, but there is still some way to go to eliminate child poverty, including the removal of the punitive benefit cap, which we hope will soon follow. A successful country invests in its children: the people who will deliver our nation’s future. Our country has failed to do this so far, and a record 4.5 million children are in poverty.
The Bill, though long overdue, is a welcome step forward for the nation’s children. We look forward to the full implementation of the Government’s child poverty strategy, and in this spirit, we are pleased to support the Bill.
Universal credit and its system of sanctions arguably institutionalise the poverty-shame nexus. Although I accept that its introduction in 2013 brought a necessary simplification to welfare payments, I nevertheless believe that the system of sanctions in particular has an implicit moralising message. Claimants must continually prove that they deserve support because they are both “poor enough” and “trying hard enough”. I have spoken with people who describe the feeling of being “presumed guilty until you are innocent”, on the assumption that every person looking for help might be “cheating the system”.
It is my belief that the two-child limit to universal credit has only added to the poverty-shame nexus. The assumption would appear to be that if you are on universal credit and have more than two children you are somehow not being responsible. Yet I have three wonderful children—I am sure that many other noble Lords also have more than two children—and I confess that I did not make a financial calculation ahead of deciding to have a third child. I wonder how many of us did. Surely, then, we have a duty to lift the sense of shame from others, not reinforce it.
Bishops on this Bench have consistently opposed the two-child limit right from its introduction. Indeed, as has already been mentioned, the former Bishop of Durham introduced a Private Member’s Bill seeking to abolish the limit in 2022. For us, this is part of a much wider calling to combat poverty in all its forms, addressing its causes and wider effects. I know that noble Lords on all sides of this House share that concern. Our differences are more to do with how, rather than whether, it is done. Yet I dare to hope that, once this policy is changed, we can work together to find other areas whereby those who are caught in poverty are enabled to contribute their gifts and skills to wider society.
After 2015, I turned to academic research. I completed a doctorate examining the politics of air power between the wars in Whitehall. Some of the men who shaped the early Royal Air Force sat on these Benches. I studied their papers in the archives in Victoria Tower. I never imagined that I might one day follow them into the Chamber.
Indeed, 100 years ago, just this Tuesday, Lord Thomson of Cardington, the first Labour Secretary of State for Air and a subject of my research, spoke in an air policy debate in this House. With striking prescience, he warned that, should another European war occur, Britain’s ports and industrial centres would be exposed to devastating attack from the air and that the RAF would be central to national defence. Lord Thomson was tragically killed in the R101 airship disaster on its maiden flight in 1930. I hope that is not an omen for my maiden outing. However, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography described him as a
“a clear and vigorous speaker, and his cheerfulness and good temper gained him many friends in the house”.
That seems an excellent example for me to at least aspire to follow.
My subsequent academic work has focused on contemporary warfare. I am co-director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute at King’s College London. I have written on many subjects, including organisational culture, air power, missile defence and deterrence in this increasingly dangerous and divided world. I commend my noble friend Lady Carberry on her speech in the International Women’s Day debate, when she highlighted continuing toxic behaviours in the Armed Forces—an issue that I have not and will not shy away from raising.
I began by explaining why the Bill has a personal resonance for me. It matters so much more for the 450,000 children it will lift out of poverty. I saw the impact of financial hardship on children while volunteering in food banks for four years.
To finish, some might wonder why a defence and security academic would choose this debate for her maiden speech. Yet the connection is clear: as we have seen time and again, global conflict and instability directly affect the cost of living. Defence, security and economic well-being are deeply intertwined. Britain’s ability to contribute to a more stable world depends on the credibility of our Armed Forces and the deterrence they provide. We are all affected by defence and security.
Your Lordships will have different perspectives and backgrounds from me. I am looking forward to working with and learning from you.
He criticised the stigmatising preconceptions about people receiving social security that have marked some political and media reactions to the Bill. These reactions have suggested that somehow spending money on lifting children out of poverty is illegitimate—part of what is dismissed by the Opposition as the “ballooning benefits bill”. This ignores an estimated £50 billion a year hacked off that bill as a result of Tory cuts and restrictions, while official figures show that spending on working-age benefits as a percentage of GDP has not increased and is not projected to increase.
Arguments about the costs of the Bill also ignore, as we have heard, the cost of not acting, in terms of the impact of poverty on public services—notably, health, education and children’s care—and on future employment prospects. We are talking about preventive spending and investment in our children.
It is all too easy for the Opposition to hide their contribution to the worsening of child poverty behind the argument that the answer lies in paid work, full stop. This is despite the fact that, as we have heard, three-fifths of those hurt by the two-child limit have a parent in work and that an estimated 70% of the additional funding will go to that group. More fundamentally, there is a widespread consensus built on academic analysis that removal of the two-child limit is the one most effective measure open to the Government to reduce child poverty at a stroke. To quote CASE at the LSE,
“changes in parental employment, whilst important, will never deliver change to child poverty rates on the scale we need to see. We can only get significant and lasting reductions in child poverty by investing in our social security system. There really is no other way”.
Research by Public First suggests that, when provided with information about the cost-effectiveness of abolition of the limit in reducing child poverty, voters’ support for the measure increases significantly. The same is true of the overall benefit cap.
I am afraid that, here, I have to introduce a note of dissent, which I am sure will not surprise the Minister. It echoes the powerful maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Teather. The Bill’s impact assessment estimates that in 2029-30 around 50,000 households will not gain and 10,000 will only partially gain because of the cap. I find it depressing that the same arguments are used about needing the cap to ensure work incentives as under the previous Government. Yes, the cap may push some parents into paid work, but by driving parents into deep poverty it creates stress and anxiety about making ends meet that makes them less effective jobseekers. This is not, as Ministers assert, in the best interests of children. Indeed, I remind my noble friend that, when the cap was introduced, the official Opposition supported the removal of child benefit from the cap on the grounds that it is received by equivalent working families and that, therefore, in order to create a more level playing field, it should not be included in the cap. Could this be looked at again, please, from the perspective of the best interests of children?
I also urge that, when the threshold limits are reviewed next year, a decision is made to uprate them annually in line with the UC standard allowance, so that we do not see more families pushed into deep poverty by the cap each year. As it is, they have been uprated only once since 2016, when they were cut. They are now worth £5,409 less in London and £4,702 elsewhere as a result.
Two other concerns have been raised about some families who will not benefit or fully benefit from the Bill. The first, raised by CPAG, of which I am honorary president, and Advice NI, relates to some families who, having migrated to UC through the managed migration process, may lose some of their transitional protection. The other, raised by Resolve Poverty, concerns families who may lose as a result of the knock-on effect on their council tax reduction. I do not think that either is mentioned in the impact assessment and I wonder whether my noble friend can throw any light on the numbers likely to be involved.
To return to the good news, the Bill will, in the words of a mother of four quoted by CPAG,
“make a world of difference”.
As the cornerstone of the first UK-wide child poverty strategy since 2010, it symbolises what a Labour Government can do to build a good society.
I am citing those figures, and I am sure others will come up with other figures, because there are no official figures on this. In fact, I asked the Minister in a Written Question in December for the Government’s figures on how many families who would have had money from the end of the two-child benefit cap would be hit by the household benefit cap. The Answer that I got on 5 January was:
“The requested information is internal analysis that is being quality assured to official statistics level. Plans to publish this in due course are ongoing”.
I wonder whether the noble Baroness can tell me how that is going.
Looking at the overall situation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that, without further policy action, child poverty rates will have crept back close to the 2024-25 level by the end of the forecast period in 2029-30, leaving a change of just 0.4% in those poverty levels. Another thing aside from the overall benefit cap is the local housing allowance, which is currently wildly inadequate.
I have two final brief points. I welcome the three maiden speakers today and look forward to those from whom we have not yet heard. They are obviously interested in child poverty but I urge them to think about branching out, as they find their feet in this House, into other areas that impact it. I spoke yesterday in the Moses Room about financial regulation. That is crucial to child poverty and a threat to the security of us all. Please think about engaging; do not just leave it to the banking insiders but pick up issues such as that as well.
Finally, to respond directly to the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, I am slightly surprised that, as the Conservatives are very into history, their leader has not really looked into the history books on the Boer War. British society and this place became very concerned that poverty, poor diet and poor housing meant that young men were not fit to fight for Britain, because of child poverty. If you are going to recruit 20,000 more soldiers, how will you do it from a society blighted by child poverty?