DWP two-child benefit cap affecting nearly 1.6 million children

Nearly 1.6million kids are affected by a "cruel" two-child benefit limit imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ). Fresh DWP data showed 1.6 million children live in affected homes - with Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Party Prime Minister, urged to scrap the cap.

Becca Lyon, head of UK child poverty at Save the Children, said: "It is an outrage that 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the unfair two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year. More and more children will suffer every year just because they have siblings, unless the UK Government acts now.

“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families from facing hardship and destitution.” Paul Carberry, chief executive of Action for Children, said: "Today’s figures confirm the relentless expansion of this cruel policy, which creates and entrenches child poverty.

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"Its impact is devastating for our country’s poorest parents who are trying their absolute hardest to make ends meet, denying them much-needed income to buy the basics for their children. Child poverty puts enormous pressure on public services and makes it much more difficult for those children to fulfil their potential.

"Ultimately, the cost of the two-child limit is far greater than the money it saves. The new government must urgently bring forward its child poverty strategy as promised in its manifesto. This must include scrapping the two-child limit."

Labour’s manifesto for government, published last week, included the promise of an “ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty”, but no mention of the two-child limit. The policy, which was introduced by George Osborne when he was chancellor, means low-income parents are denied key benefits, including Universal Credit, for their third and any subsequent children born from April 2017.

Eduin Latimer, a research economist at the IFS, said the two-child limit had “a particularly big impact on the number of children in poverty for two reasons: it mostly affects poorer households and, by definition, its effects are entirely concentrated in families with at least three children”.