‘It’s good to hear that ending child poverty is central for Labour, but the best way to achieve that is by ending the two-child limit on benefits which is driving so many children into hardship. A child poverty reduction plan is essential, but scrapping the two-child limit would have to be step one.'
Parents need support to provide for their children with security and without constant worry. Imagine the UK without any child poverty – a country with all children well fed and housed, feeling secure, and growing up healthy and confident.
It’s right that benefits are uprated as usual but this should never have been in doubt and legislation mandating inflationary increases is needed as a basic protection for living standards. Struggling families have been worrying themselves sick for months about whether an unmanageable income cut was coming in order to provide the government with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat moment.
A family’s ability to get universal credit is often based not on their actual circumstances, but on a fictional version of their circumstances. Welfare rights worker Carri Swann explains.
With 38 bills but no direct help with spiralling costs, this speech was a far cry from what struggling families needed to hear today. Government offered no short term comfort for parents struggling to feed their kids in the face of rocketing prices, and no long term vision for ending child poverty.