News

The harms of the cost of living crisis are multiplied by the benefit cap and two-child limit, flagship policies of the welfare reform agenda which sharply sever the relationship between need and support provided by our social security system.

Leading children’s charities and commissioners have written to the leaders in the House of Commons to call for an end to the two-child limit.

Official figures show tragic milestone reached: 1 in 10 children hit by two-child limit.

This briefing, from CPAG, End Child Poverty, the Church of England, and the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project, marks the sixth anniversary of the two-child limit.

On the sixth anniversary of the two-child limit, a Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) survey finds widespread suffering and hardship among families affected by the policy with parents struggling to meet children’s basic needs as living costs soar.

CPAG has responded to the government's consultation on the forthcoming Budget.

A report commissioned by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in Scotland from the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University has found a widening gap between the cost of raising a child in Scotland and actual family incomes, despite the significant impact of Scottish government policies and lower childcare costs.

This briefing summaries the findings of two papers from the Benefit Changes and Larger Families research study which explore whether the two-child limit has affected families’ decisions about how many children to have.

Under the two-child limit, parents are not entitled to any extra support through universal credit or child tax credit to help with raising a third or subsequent child born after 6 April 2017. This means they lose out on up to £2,935 a year, and puts families’ budgets under enormous strain. Five years after the introduction of the two-child limit, an estimated 1.4 million children in 400,000 families are now affected by the policy. Unless it is abolished, the number of children affected will reach 3 million, as more children are born under the policy.

This joint report from CPAG, the Church of England and the Welfare Reform and Larger Families research project presents the latest estimates of the number of families affected by the two-child limit, and provides an insight into the impact of the policy using survey data from families directly affected by it. It is a continuation of a series of annual reports tracking the impact of this policy over time.