LIMITING Universal Credit payments to cover just two children was wrong and should be ended, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, told the House of Lords last Friday.
Introducing the Second Reading of his Bill to abolish the restriction, he said that the policy contradicted the belief that every child should be treated equally. “This policy is the biggest driver of the increase in child poverty,” he said. “Families’ falling into difficulty are discovering that the social-security system is not supporting their whole family as they expected, where they are a larger family. The third child is ignored, and thus the whole family suffers.”
Work by the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project had concluded that the two-child limit’s main outcome was to drive financial hardship and often destitution. “This is unacceptable. It is enough reason for the policy to be scrapped,” the Bishop said.
While the Government saw it as a money-saving exercise, research had found that children who had experienced poverty were less likely to pay tax, less likely to have high-paid jobs, and more likely to need support from public services. “The truth is that this policy will likely increase the long-term cost to the public purse,” Bishop Butler said.
“More important are the unquantifiable impacts: the suffering of living in an overcrowded home, or not being able to join in with costly school activities and the shame that sometimes accompanies that.”
Exemptions did not account for the disproportional impact on people of ethnic-minority and faith backgrounds. “Some faith groups are penalised because, for them, contraception and termination are simply not valid options,” he said.
A survey by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service had found that 57 per cent of expectant mothers who were aware of the two-child limit said that it was important in deciding whether to continue the pregnancy. “The fact that some women could feel pressured by a government policy to terminate a pregnancy that they may have otherwise wanted seems abhorrent,” the Bishop said.
“It is clear to me that this policy is ineffective, devastating in impact, and essentially immoral in character. It is a policy which is defended on terms that do not add up. It should be embarrassing that the price paid for its fallacies are our children.”
His call for an impact report on the policy was rejected by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Work and Pensions, Baroness Stedman-Scott, who said that the Government believed that the most sustainable way to lift children out of poverty was by supporting parents into work and progressing in it, wherever possible.
“This requires a balanced system that provides strong work incentives and support for those who need it, but also ensures a sense of fairness to the taxpayer and to the many working families who do not see their incomes rise when they have more children. We judge that the policy to support a maximum of two children is a proportionate way to achieve these objectives,” she said.
Concluding the debate, the Bishop said: “We are seeing an increase in child poverty, yet there seems to be a lack of willingness to address that where it is growing. I accept that some action is being taken, but it is not stopping some getting poorer and poorer, and some becoming in danger of falling into destitution.”