Labour must seize the moment to show child poverty matters in push for growth | Heather Stewart Scrapping two-child benefit cap is among levers Rachel Reeves could pull – yet chancellor remains silent on ‘shameful’ levels of poverty.
Tayyaba Siddiqui was one of a group of parents and carers who sat around a table in Downing Street last month with the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and the employment minister Alison McGovern to discuss the challenges of raising children in poverty – and what needs to change.
When it comes to solutions, there is a broad consensus among advocates and policy experts that the best-targeted measure would be to scrap the two-child limit, which caps some benefits for the third and subsequent children in a family, and had been applied to 450,000 of the UK’s poorest households by April last year.
Some inside government share a similar set of concerns: that while Labour’s manifesto committed to tackling child poverty, aspects of the challenge sit uneasily with the party’s current preoccupations.
Yet while they do not doubt the sincerity of the ministers directly involved, there is growing wariness among campaigners about whether the long-awaited child poverty strategy will come with the necessary resources to make a real difference.
