The two-child benefit cap is “cruel”, the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown tells the New Statesman Podcast in a special interview out on Friday 23 May.
Devised by the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne in 2016, the limit is considered a driver of child poverty and it is a certain source of division within today’s Labour Party. The Labour government chose not to scrap the cap, and has removed the whip from MPs rebelling against this decision. The party promised in its manifesto to end reliance on food banks, and to reduce child poverty in this Parliament. Removing the two-child benefit cap could pull hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.
Speaking to the New Statesman’s Britain Editor and podcast host Anoosh Chakelian ahead of his guest-edited issue themed around child poverty, Brown laid out his funding ideas for reducing child poverty. These include a gambling tax, commercial bank levy, and changes to Gift Aid rules for higher-rate taxpayers, among other measures. Outlining these on the podcast, Brown suggested they would be possible without “breaking the government’s tax commitments” or “breaking the fiscal rules, which, of course, [the Chancellor] Rachel Reeves is obviously right to be concerned about”.
In the interview, Brown drew on exclusive polling for his New Statesman guest edit by Focaldata, which revealed 42 per cent of voters are against the cap, and more than 75 per cent of those who support it say it should be scrapped if it is shown to be a cost-effective way of reducing poverty.
“The Reform Party, many of the Conservative Party, the Liberals, the [Scottish] Nationalist Party, they all support lifting the two-child limit,” Brown revealed. “Now, of course, it’s expensive because it was designed to save a lot of money at the expense of children, but you just think of a family that has lost £66 a week overnight – their child is born, the third child, and they don’t get the same amount that they get for the second child.
“It really is cruel to see a third child as almost a second-class citizen in that way, and that’s what’s got to change. Now, I think the government can do this because I’ve suggested the ways it can be funded. I think it should be hypothecated in the sense of earmarks, so that people know that the money is going for a good purpose.”
[See more: Inside the Conservative Party’s existential spiral]
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