Scrap two-child benefit cap, Kinnock tells Starmer

Telegraph

2 days ago

Lord Kinnock has urged Sir Keir Starmer to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
The Labour peer and former party leader said the policy, which restricts access to child tax credits and other benefits, was responsible for keeping hundreds of thousands of children in poverty.
Lord Kinnock's intervention comes weeks after he called on Sir Keir to introduce a new wealth tax and suggested a 2 per cent levy on assets worth more than £10 million.
His remarks will pile further pressure on Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to rethink the two-child limit in the Budget this autumn, despite warnings that she already faces a financial black hole of up to £50bn.
The two-child benefit cap was brought in by the Conservatives in 2017 and prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or Universal Credit for their third and any subsequent children.
Sir Keir has refused to scrap the cap because of the economic implications of doing so. Seven Labour MPs were suspended last July after they backed an SNP proposal to ditch the two-child limit.
Asked about the policy in an interview with The Mirror, Lord Kinnock said: 'I would want them to do it. They may not be able to do it all at once, but I really want them to move in that direction.
'Because the figures are that, if that did occur, it would mean that about 600,000 kids, fewer, are in poverty.'
He added: 'Yes, I would say that. It might have to be done in a phased fashion – simply because of the revenue implications – but heading strongly and evidently in that direction is the way to go.'
'The economics of Robin Hood'
Lord Kinnock went on to repeat his call for a wealth tax, arguing that targeting the wealth of the richest Britons could dramatically reduce the scale of child poverty.
'I think people would see the justification of increasing taxes on assets and the very, very highly paid – I'm talking about the top one per cent – in order to make the transfer directly to reduce child poverty,' he said.
'I know it's the economics of Robin Hood, but I don't think there is anything terribly bad about that.'
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, sparked a backlash from the Labour Left last month after stating that Sir Keir's capitulation on welfare cuts left less room to abolish the two-child cap.
The Prime Minister was forced to heavily water down plans to slash disability benefits by £5bn a year after more than 120 of his own MPs said they could not support his proposals as they stood.
Pressed on whether the cap was likely to stay because there was now less money, Ms Phillipson said: 'The decisions that have been taken this last week do make future decisions harder.
'But all of that said, we will look at this collectively in terms of all of the ways that we can lift children out of poverty.'
While Labour has refused to explicitly rule out abolishing the cap, Cabinet ministers have repeatedly warned that it would mean savings would have to be found elsewhere.
In a recent rare intervention, Gordon Brown, the former prime minister,
as a 'cancer in society', comparing its current scale to the deprivation he saw as a child more than 50 years ago.
'What the Conservatives did was to treat the third children as if they were second-class citizens,' Mr Brown said. 'But the needs of a third child are exactly the same as the needs of the first and second.'