Farage is wrong about the two-child benefit cap. We must keep it

Telegraph

27-05-2025

Spiralling welfare spending is bankrupting Britain. By the end of the decade it's forecast to reach £378 billion.
We face a reckoning unless we do something radical. But the conversation in Westminster is untethered from reality. Instead of debating how to bring the welfare bill down, and move hundreds of thousands of people off welfare into the dignity of work, the question is whether we should add to that bill by scrapping the two-child benefits cap.
Until now Starmer has upheld it. Morgan McSweeney – the advisor who directs the Prime Minister's every move – has told him that it's too unpopular to do away with. But with his hard Left backbenchers turning on him, the puppet Prime Minister has cut his strings and looks set to scrap the cap.
Let's be clear what we're talking about here. The two-child benefit cap doesn't refer to child benefit. That benefit is available to all parents for all their children. It refers to those on universal credit. They received thousands of pounds on top of their child benefit for their first two children. The cap stops them receiving even more for their third, fourth and fifth child and so on. Why? Because allowing families to have children that they can't afford while prudent savers who do the right thing are forced to wait wasn't right.
The two-child benefits cap is in place as a matter of fairness. I certainly thought carefully about the financial implications of having children – as do the vast majority. It is about personal responsibility; of living within your means so not to impose unnecessary burdens on others.
Before the cap was introduced in 2017 there were scores of workless families with ten or more children living on state benefits worth more than £60,000 a year, much more money than they could hope to earn if they entered the job market. They would need to earn £93,000 to be left with the same amount of money after tax.
And on top of that, they were entitled to be housed at the taxpayer's expense in ever-larger properties as their number of children increased. It was a trap for welfare dependency.
The decision to scrap it would cost an estimated £3.5 billion a year, and would likely rise each year as workless families choose to benefit from it. As Kemi Badenoch rightly pointed out, it is a handout that will disproportionately benefit larger migrant families who could have lived here for as little as five years.
So why is Farage backing this mad policy? Has a joint found its way into his usual pack of Marlborough Golds? Has he cooked this up after one too many pints at his local? This is without doubt Farage's biggest mistake.
He's diagnosed the illness, but prescribed the wrong cure. We agree that demography is destiny. In the 1970s, there were four working age people to every pensioner. Now, we're fast approaching a ratio of two to one. That's pushed total tax receipts down and forced spending up for the same level of services. Without Brits having more children taxes will continue to rise, debt will explode, and public services will crumble under pressure.
Most of the falling birth rate is explained by more women having no children at all. Scrapping the two-child policy would do nothing to change that, but will shred the fraying social contract between the state and our shrinking middle classes.
The solution is to make families affordable again. Young adults are currently spending more money than ever on housing costs, leaving them with little disposable income to starts a family.
It's why we must densify our cities and radically curtail housing demand from immigration, neither of which Labour are doing. A government serious about pro-family policy would make childcare cheaper and use the tax system to incentivise parenting – but Labour refuse to.
Instead, Labour and Reform are locked in a bidding war to spend more in handouts. We already spend £100 billion annually just to service our debt – more than on healthcare, education or defence. Their dangerous game will eventually come crashing down.
Robert Jenrick is the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice