New Labour MPs To Face Immediate Pressure Over Two-Child Cap
John McDonnell at Momentum conference in 2017 (Kevin Hayes/Alamy Live News)
3 min read
Newly elected Labour MPs are set to come under immediate pressure from the party’s left to defy the leadership by backing moves to scrap the two-child benefit cap ahead of the King’s Speech.
Momentum, the organisation founded to champion Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid in 2015, will on Thursday launch a lobbying tool aimed at persuading Labour MPs to support the push against the cap.
Thousands of the group’s members and supporters will be provided with a pre-written email to send to their Labour MP, or to Prime Minister Keir Starmer if they are based in a non-Labour seat, about the “no child left behind” campaign.
“For a lot of the MPs it’ll be the first time they’ve ever been put under pressure to support an issue in Parliament,” a source involved in the campaign said. “This is an opportunity for them to demonstrate whether they are serious about addressing child poverty.”
The two-child benefit cap, which in most households restricts the receipt of benefits to a family’s first two children, was introduced in 2017 by then-Tory chancellor George Osborne. The Child Poverty Action Group has said that scrapping it would lift 250,000 children out of poverty.
Government figures published on Thursday said over 1.5m children in 440,000 households, or around one in nine children, were affected by the cap last year. Charity Save The Children said the figures were an "outrage" and called for the cap to be "scrapped immediately to prevent families from facing hardship and destitution".
Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has announced plans to table amendments to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, expected to take place in the autumn, that would see the cap ditched. He has urged the Government to change its position before then.
Despite unease among Labour's top team about the policy, Starmer has ruled out lifting the cap – but admitted last month that he is "not immune from just how powerful an argument this is".
McDonnell told PoliticsHome: “Labour’s manifesto committed our new government to implementing an anti-poverty strategy to tackle the scourge of poverty in our society. Scrapping the brutal two-child cap could be a vitally important first step in this strategy and would send out a clear message about the priorities of this new administration.”
The Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington has advocated a “modest” wealth tax to fund the move. The Trades Union Congress last year proposed a one-off tax on the richest 140,000 people in the UK – those with assets above £3m – saying it could raise more than £10bn.
Sasha Das Gupta, the newly-elected co-chair of Momentum, said: “Policies like scrapping the two-child benefit cap are popular and more urgent than ever. Labour cannot simply promise a ‘strategy’ on this – we need to scrap the cap and promote bold policies for all. That’s what real Labour values look like.”
The latest government figures in March showed 4.3 million children were living in relative poverty in 2023 and 3.6 million were living in households of absolute low income.
The Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Scottish National Party and independent MPs are all against the two-child cap policy. New MPs including the Greens and former Labour leader Corbyn have committed to challenging the government on the issue.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also spoken out against the cap, saying on Wednesday that it is “wrong” and “needs to be reversed”.
“We want to create the financial conditions where we can move on the two-child limit,” Sarwar told the Daily Record. “We will continue to push for it to happen and we want to make sure we’re part of helping create the economic conditions to make that happen.”
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