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SAnd keir starmer It is right to make a big show of the government’s decision to restore the child element of universal credit to households With more than two children. He and the rest of the Labor Party are right to be proud of the cuts child poverty He will follow.
The decision was announced in the budget last week. A comprehensive child poverty strategy was unveiled on Friday. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who led the strategy, will create a Statement in Parliament next weekIt’s a decision the Labor government wants people to pay attention to, and an argument it wants to engage in,
There remains an argument. Opinion polls suggest that Benefit limit of two childrenIntroduced by George Osborne as Chancellor and popular to apply to children born from April 2017 onwards. In short, people should not have children if they cannot support them.
But in reality, there are many reasons why large families face hard times: relationships fall apart; the stroke of illness or death; Jobs were lost. And it’s worth pointing out, as the Prime Minister does again and again, that three-quarters of children living in poverty are in working families.
decisive argument, in IndependentThe idea is that children should not suffer the consequences of their parents’ decisions. No one asked to be born, and no matter how much the general public may dislike irresponsible parenting, punishing a child is wrong.
Therefore, we should be pleased that society’s collective resources are being deployed to improve the quality of life and life prospects of nearly half a million children.
The government’s anti-poverty strategy does not just involve removing the two-child limit, which is also welcome. The government estimates that scrapping the two-child limit on universal credit and other benefits, at a cost of £3.5 billion, would lift 450,000 children above the poverty line – and extending it would lift a further 100,000 children out of poverty. free school mealsplease help energy bill And child care is subsidized.
We have some sympathy with the views of the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who argued that rather than removing the two-child limit altogether, it could be lifted for a third child and some of the money should be put into reviving New Labour’s Sure Start centres. But this is quite modest, given that children’s “hubs” such as Sure Start are also being expanded.
Meanwhile, the government is less entitled to claim credit for promising to fund more temporary accommodation so that local councils can fulfill their statutory responsibilities – something it seems should be doing.
The big problem with the government’s policy choices is that almost all the additional public spending in the budget is being added to the welfare bill, while labor market policies are making it harder for people to get out of poverty through work.
Welfare spending should be curbed by balancing higher spending on tackling child poverty with a tougher effort to slow growth spending on disability benefits,
As far as the labor market is concerned, a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy, of which a child poverty strategy should also be a part, should do more to get people off welfare and into work. Instead, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has made choices that make it harder, especially for young people those on low wagesto find work. Increases in employers’ National Insurance contributions were skewed towards the costs of hiring low-wage workers, while increases in the minimum wage add to the costs of new hires, and the Employment Rights Bill would add to non-wage costs and risks.
But this child poverty strategy is a huge step in the right direction which, by the end of this Parliament, will make a significant difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and their parents. After all, this is one area in which this Labor government is really making a welcome difference.