Please find below the contents of a letter I wrote to Sir Keir Starmer outlining my disappointment that Labour will not pledge to banish the two-child limit should we form a government after the next election.

Sir Keir Starmer

Leader of the Opposition

House of Commons

London

SW1A 0AA

17^th July 2023

Dear Sir Keir

The Labour Party’s commitment to scrapping the two-child benefit cap

Harold Wilson once said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. Only a couple of years ago you approvingly used this quote, stating that today our moral crusade must be to address the inequalities and injustices exposed by the covid pandemic. There can be no more urgent crisis today than the explosion of child poverty that is blighting our country.

It is one of the reasons that I was so profoundly disappointed to hear over the weekend your position that, should Labour form the next government, we would not commit to scrapping the cruel two-child benefit cap. As someone who grew up in a large family with very little money and having seen circumstances worsen through no fault of our own I know just how important this support would be.

Here in the North East, child poverty has risen at a staggering pace over the past decade. As of 2021/22 almost 35% of children in the North East are growing up below the poverty line up from 26% in 2014/15, the steepest rise of anywhere in the country representing an extra 51,000 children in our region alone falling into poverty.

Back in 2021 I published a report into child poverty in my constituency of Wansbeck, covering the causes, effects, and potential solutions to rising child poverty levels. The first and most fundamental suggestion reform that came out of that report, shared by countless organisations fighting poverty up and down the country, was scrapping the two-child limit.

For years I have been campaigning to scrap this policy, and have reassured my constituents at each election that a Labour government would get rid of it. I fear that people in held back communities in my constituency will be waking up to this news and asking themselves what the point in voting at all is if their best interests are left unrepresented by mainstream parties. Indeed, I fear how this could be used by far right parties who continue to grow in popularity in deprived pockets of our communities by tapping into a growing sense of apathy and feelings of abandonment by mainstream political parties felt by an ever increasing number of people.

Poverty campaigners such as the Child Poverty Action Group have said that scrapping the cap would be the quickest and most effective means of lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty across the country. The results of the policy are stark. The poverty rate for children in families with three or more children was 42%, compared with 23% and 22% among children in families with one or two children respectively, a huge increase that is a direct result of the two-child limit. It should also be noted that of children growing up in poverty, more than 70% come from working families.

Why should children growing up in larger families be condemned to poverty through no fault of their own? Should we not encourage policies that promote family life and responsible parenthood to ensure that all of our children get the best possible start in life?

Scrapping the policy would cost an estimated £1.3bn, and would immediately lift around 250,000 children out of poverty, and a further 850,000 out of abject poverty. To compare, the government spent £4bn on PPE during the pandemic that did not meet requirements and was eventually burnt.

I grew up in a mining family as one of five brothers. We had little to share other than love and things got worse when my dad was injured meaning he couldn’t work for some time. I find it staggering that my party would fail to support scrapping a cap that condemns families like the one I grew up in to a life of unnecessary financial hardship and deprivation. And for what? To keep the books balanced while the rich get richer and more and more people get dragged into financial hardship. I cannot help but think if more members of the shadow front bench and their advisors had grown up in families that would have been affected by this policy themselves then they may have come to a different conclusion.

The Labour Party of the post-war years set out an ambitious program to build a new Jerusalem by harnessing the power of the state to redistribute wealth and transform the lives of ordinary hard working people. And they did, building the NHS and welfare state that we too often take for granted today.

Our latest set of missions, whilst noble, fail to capture the same enthusiastic response from the public. Whilst grabbing the best growth in the G7 is something worth attaining, as an MP in a peripheral part of the country how can we be assured that residents in South East Northumberland will benefit from this? Indeed since 2010 only 2% of newly created jobs were in the North East of England. What do children with nothing have to look forward to?

The predicament the country faces today is not dissimilar to that post war Britain faced. As we emerge from a global pandemic to an economic orthodoxy failing working people who are crying out for the type of bold and radical policies that once before shifted the economic balance back into their favour. I urge the Labour front benches today to rediscover that ambition, and commit to doing whatever it takes to banish poverty from our communities once and for all, beginning with committing to getting rid of the two-child limit as their very first action should Labour be handed the keys to Number 10 at the next election.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Lavery

Member of Parliament for Wansbeck