Dr Yekaterina Chzhen
Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
Twitter/X: @kat_chzhen
Email: chzheny@tcd.ie
UK Election 2024
Section 5: Policy and strategy
50. It’s the cost-of-living-crisis, stupid! (Prof Aeron Davis)
51. The last pre-war vote? Defence and foreign policy in the 2024 Election (Dr Russell Foster)
52. The 2024 UK general election and the absence of foreign policy (Dr Victoria Honeyman)
53. Fractious consensus: defence policy at the 2024 General Election (Dr Ben Jones)
54. The psycho-politics of climate denial in the 2024 UK election (Prof Candida Yates, Dr Jenny Alexander)
55. How will the Labour government fare and what should they do better? (Prof Rick Stafford and team)
56. Finding the environment: climate obstructionism and environmental movements on TikTok (Dr Abi Rhodes)
57. Irregular migration: ‘Stop the boats’ vs ‘Smash the Gangs’ (Prof Alex Balch)
58. The sleeping dog of ‘Europe: UK relations with the EU as a non-issue (Prof Simon Usherwood)
59. Labour: a very conservative housing manifesto (Prof Becky Tunstall)
60. Why the Labour Government must abolish the two-child benefit limit policy (Dr Yekaterina Chzhen)
61. Take the next right: mainstream parties’ positions on gender and LGBTQ+ equality issues (Dr Louise Luxton)
Scrapping the two-child limit policy is the most effective way for the new government to show that it is committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity. The two-child limit is cruel and regressive. Reversing it will immediately lift half a million children out of poverty at little cost. This is why it was so controversial that the Labour Party ruled out scrapping itwell before the election had even been announced, which was a departure from their previous manifesto. Meanwhile, other mainstream parties like the Green Party and SNP pledged their commitment to remove the two-child limit in their 2024 campaign manifestos.
The two-child limit reduces social support for families with more than two children. From April 2017, a family claiming means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit, who had a third or subsequent child born after 6 April 2017 did not receive a child supplement for that child. This amounted to a loss of around £3,200 a year and affects 1 in 10 children.
The two-child limit rule is regressive because it punishes those who are already struggling. NGOs who work with poor families report that large families are cutting back on essentials as a result of the policy. Parents in large families talk of “children going to school in uniform that doesn’t fit, missing out on after school clubs, and not being able to have friends to the house, as there isn’t enough food to feed an extra mouth”, according to Save the Children UK.
Our own research, using data from nationally representative income surveys, found that the poorest large families lost out the most, but better off large families were also affected. When the two-child limit was announced in 2015/16, 27% of children in large families lived in income poor households (before housing costs), compared with 17% of children in smaller families. By 2019/20, the poverty rate for large families rose to 37%, while it remained at 17% for smaller families. Between 2015/16 and 2019/20, the incomes of the poorest large families fell by 18% in real terms, while those of middle-income large families fell by 9%.
The two-child limit was never part of the Conservative Party’s election manifesto. However, it was consistent with the “lost decade” of austerity and falling living standards. The rationale for the two-child limit was to reduce the government deficit, but it was also intended to “encourage parents to reflect carefully on their readiness to support an additional child” (as quoted in the 2015 impact assessment). If the Conservative Government assumed that there would be too few large families to matter, this is not the case. Our analysis shows that in 2019, one in three children aged 8–12 lived in large families.
Removing the two-child limit is not expensive. Half a million children will be lifted out of poverty today at a cost of just £2.5 billion, according to estimates by the Resolution Foundation. This is a fraction of the £117.5 billion the last government spent on social security for working-age adults and children in 2022/23. More than 100 organisations behind the End Child Poverty Coalition have called for the two-child limit to be scrapped.
If the Labour Government does not prioritise reversing the two-child limit policy, it is not serious about improving children’s life chances. Their 2024 General Election manifesto mentions children 170 times in the section on breaking down barriers to opportunity. They promise to invest in childcare, education, healthcare and housing. All of this is necessary, but will take time to bear fruit. Abolishing the two-child limit is the quickest way to undo some of the damage done to poorer families over the past 14 years.
