The two-child benefit cap is social cleansing. Starmer must end it - Rosie Duffield

[IwantToRetire]

In an outspoken challenge to her leader, Labour’s Rosie Duffield says Tory rules penalising women with three or more children are worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale

Key points

• Labour MP condemns “anti-feminist and unequal” legislation, especially its “rape clause”
• Sir Keir Starmer has said scrapping the law is unaffordable at present
• More than a dozen backbenchers are forcing the issue with an amendment to the King’s Speech
• Like her friend JK Rowling, Duffield has previously attacked Labour’s record on women

The two-child limit is a feminist issue. It is a heinous piece of legislation and the reason above all others that I was driven to stand as a member of parliament. With the introduction of such a sinister and overtly sexist law, I was propelled towards Westminster to stop it.

article continues at https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rosie-duffield-mp-two-child-benefit-cap-scncpn9dd

and at https://archive.ph/5On4a

Do you know how little money the parents have to have for DC to get fsm's? Anyway as I said it's not about how much money the parents get/have it's about knowing every primary school DC has at least 1 meal a day.

Everyone at infants gets free school meals?
It would be good if they rolled that out throughout the school years

(Mine are at private school so not relevant to them but it seems such an obvious way to help)

I totally agree with this response. DC going without food and fruit etc is far more common than people realise. Often parents have money but spend it on themselves. Society has to help cushion the DC of these parents. Breakfast clubs and free school meals would be great for DC.

I don't understand people's stance on this. It's as if they think 2 children is an accident and 3 is too far. Why not make it one child, then.

Yes I do, I also know your feelings about those on benefits

The government should be allowed to go through their banks to see what they are spending their money on. They should also be taxed on their benefits

And even though you've been told numerous times that on UC the more you work the more you earn you still go onto threads about benefits and bring up people refusing to work extra hours because they lose benefits . Not to mention how you talk about the benefits people receive when they have disabled children even if they are working

So don't try and pretend you care about children from low income families, you just feel sorry for those kids who's parents have money but don't feed them

I do agree this is a feminist issue. When couple split the woman nearly always takes the kids and the 4 kids that were affordable as a couple become impossible as a single parent with standard maintenance.

THIS!!!
Also, the comments on threads about this issue make me utterly despair. Mumsnet used to be a haven of intelligent women. Now it just feels like a coven of pursed lipped Basics with neither imagination or empathy.
Not everyone on UC is unemployed.
Child benefit IS an “actual benefit” despite middle class women getting it..
MEN continue to procreate recklessly with no penalty. In fact once they are in a new family, or create more children, they are no longer required to pay for their existing children.
Rosie is right.
99% of lone parents are women.
Children of lone parents are more likely to live in poverty.
Benefits for children directly enable poorer children to break the cycle of poverty.
Not every woman with more than two children who ends up needing state help to pay for childcare so she can work and pay rent is a feckless slag!
Measures that help children rise out of poverty, that help mothers (again, mothers, women, are much more likely to be poor than fathers-men) to work and progress in life, these things benefit the whole society.

Force the men to pay for it then. Not taxpayers.

I agree. It serves no-one in our society especially children from poor deprived families to be kept in poverty. 1 in 4 children in the uk currently lives in relative poverty! How is this possible in 2024!

Its unfair to penalise the children in these families. Its not their fault! It’s sad when people come on here and say ‘well I stopped at 2 because i couldn’t afford it’. I don’t understand that attitude of ‘well it’s not fair, I didn’t so you shouldn’t’.

Is this a comparison between being able to heat a home, feed and clothe a child and the huge injustice of VAT on Private school fees?
This is about the safety net in the UK. This is about children living in poverty.
Like many posters the number of children I have is limited by what I can afford. But that is 100% unrelated to wanting to live in a country that does provides a safety net for all children and families sufficient that they can eat and stay warm. UC does not even cover the basics as it is. I don't want to punish people with larger families than mine just because finances have influenced the decisions I've made.

I've never suggested the government should go through people's bank accounts to see what they spend their money on. I don't know where you got that from but if you find it please do link it. I have said if DWP go through benefit claimants (including state pensioners) bank accounts it will be an algorithm by the bank and simply be looking if an account has more than £16k or not. This is purely to detect fraud not judge how people spend their money. I do think benefits should be taxed at the same rate that salaries are. You say UC is decided by 'the more you work the more you earn' I was under the impression UC was decided by various factors such as how many DC in the family, if any were disabled, if a person was a carer, if childcare was needed and if accommodation was rented and how much rent was paid. I don't recall stating people refuse to work because they lose benefits and I don't know anyone this would apply to either, but again if you think I have please link. I don't distinguish between DC from low income families and richer families who don't feed their DC. I just think ALL DC regardless of parents income or level of care should get a free breakfast club and a free school meal. I don't have any school aged DC so it would not benefit me. My DC are grown up now, but I'd be happy if some of my taxes went to pay for this.

"Good" news for people concerned about overpopulation and associated climate change, the next crisis on the horizon is population collapse.

Birthrates falling precipitously across the world mean that if trends continue, (and they look difficult to stop or reverse) we won't be able to offset financially with immigration because of falling birth rates in those countries too.

There's many reasons for this but we definitely seem to be moving as a species towards investing more resources in fewer children, either on purpose (as some in the thread have indicated) or by social and economic forces delaying motherhood later so women are bumping up against their fertile window and having fewer children or missing it entirely.

I think the two child cap should (when we can afford it) be lifted. Supporting low to medium income families is about trying to alleviate child poverty which is bad for all sorts of social reasons (education, crime, health, addiction etc) and isn't about rewarding/punishing the parents.

It's also an economic stimulus really because families are very likely to spend that money. So it feeds back through the tax system anyway whilst paying for goods and services.

@IwantToRetire at least it should eventually put an end to those headlines in the papers!! single mum with six kids in 2 bedroomed flat!!! sensible people not on benefits usually only have two kids because that is all they can afford so why should people who live on benefits have more than two kids???

The problem was the thread was inaccurate and only covered a very specific set of circumstances, i.e. a single parent in London receiving £1500 in childcare subsidy a month and with massive rent.

Most people on UC receive nothing like that and many are living in deep poverty.

I think a lot of the discussion around the cap is based on a false premise. There seems to be an idea that some people are "benefit families" and some are not. From that we have the conclusion that the "benefit families" shouldn't have more than two children.

There may have been a point in time when this applied to a tiny minority of people - that there was a part of the population who turned 18 and claimed benefits forever and never worked. But actually studies that look into poverty failed to find even one family that did this.

What studies into poverty show is that those who are consistently the lowest earners bounce in and out of work during their adult lives due to casualisation, fire at will within two years and zero hours and short hours contracts. At pinch points of worklessness, those people will claim out of work benefits. At other times, they will claim in work benefits, now mostly rolled into universal credit.

And they do that because even though they're working they can't support themselves with their wages. And they can't support themselves with their wages because that is how the CEOs of Iceland, Sainsbury's, Tesco's, Amazon and how successive UK governments for the past 20 years want things set up. All of them are more than happy to have a precariate workforce with no assets, no savings, no security, rumbling along on the bottom with no stake whatsoever in society ... and then they tell them they can't even have kids. And when they do have kids, because everyone has kids, our state gets all finger pointy and says "well, you lost the game, you lost the lottery, fuck those kids you have".

It isn't social cleansing, it is an expectation that parents behave responsibly.

I grew up one of 7 in a free school meals family. Parents kept on having babies because df thought it showed what a 'big man' he was, and because he liked the 'family allowance'. At one point he tried to persuade my 45yo dm to have another baby so he could give up work completely and live off family allowance.

Being a child in those circumstances is an absolute misery. Df saw us as a financial asset, but we damn near starved while he gambled.

I'm sure Rosie Duffield means well but she doesn't have a clue about the reality. Keep the 2 child cap, and both women and children are protected from being mere revenue streams.

Woah, that's quite an outlier situation there. Not sure anyone should be formulating any kind of policy based on your awful childhood.

As for parents behaving responsibly, most people have children they can afford right up to the point where they can't afford them which can over the course of 18 years be precipitated by anything from the list of big bad events you never saw coming like bereavement, illness, disability, redundancy etc. What do you propose such responsible parents do in any of those circumstances? Pick their two favourite kids and feed them?

@HauntedBungalow I expect people to stop at two.

Rather than lifting the benefit cap to cover more children, I'd like the govt to raise the access level for free school meals.

To give schools extra budget so poorer children can access school trips and sports kit that their wealthier class mates have.

I'd like all 16-18yos entitled to supported bus travel so many don't have to leave school early for financial reasons.
I'd like to see young carers given far more support.
I'd like to see care leavers given more support.

Basically I'd like the govt to spend any extra money on the children that already exist rather than encouraging people to have more children they cannot afford. And to make sure the money reaches the children through school, rather than giving it to the parents.

Why do you want people to stop at two? If the upper limit is two, the eventual total is less than population replacement. What is so magical about two that you consider any above that should be removed from national fiscal planning?

Most people are happy with two, and most two parent families are able to provide adequate housing, food, clothing, love, attention for two. Two allows for a boy & a girl (although obviously down to luck on that one).

Having more children is always a choice but without state subsidy so it cannot become an exploitative men's money-making racket, open to abuse.

With a soaring population and a housing shortage, replacement rates really aren't a priority.

If we want fewer children to grow up in poverty, we need to set our priorities & stick to them.

And @HauntedBungalow , no, it isn't an 'outlier situation'. It's just not one you've come across. Perhaps you live in an affluent area. But believe me, it is far from rare, which is probably why the cap was introduced in the first place.

Where there is free money, there will always be men taking advantage.

You don't know anything about where or how I live.

And your father's behaviour has nothing to do with why the cap was introduced.

As for most families being able to support two children, how did you arrive at such a conclusion? It sounds pretty arbitrary. Most families in the UK have two or fewer children (the average is 1.9). But, 51% of families claim some kind of state benefit. So most families have fewer than two children, but most of them can't support those children without state help.

There are many reasons for that, most of them linked to us being an isolated economy with a top heavy aging population in the throes of the downward wage spiral of late stage capitalism with the attendant twin problems of money devaluation and asset hoarding.

None of it will be solved by pulling a magic number of children out of our collective arse and leaving the rest to fend for themselves like some kind of mad backwards Logan's Run.

It's not child benefit that's capped. It's the child element of universal credit. Which is around £280 per child per month. (£3200 pa)

Child benefit is not given to people earning over £60k at all.

Policies like access to free childcare hours being the same if there is one earner or two are discriminatory towards women. Those are the kind of policies that should be amended.

not policies that expect people to include a contingency buffer when choosing the number of children to have. Yes, circumstances change. That is why people plan.

"And as astonished that on a feminist forum anyone would suggest that women who have been driven over the edge should be further humilated by being told we dont trust you with money, so we will give you a voucher."

But we give people 'vouchers' for plenty of things because we don't trust parents with the money.

* Housing benefit paid by central government directly to councils.
* Council tax paid by central government directly to councils.
* Free school meals, rather than money for packed lunches.
* Childcare vouchers.

If we already accept that some parents can't be trusted to spend their benefits money on housing or providing lunch for their own children, why should heating or family groceries be any different?

Maybe vouchers, instead of money, would actually be the best way to ensure kids are housed, clothed and fed properly?

If you've got your hand out asking for help, I don't think you're in any position to turn your nose up at vouchers.

We stopped at Two as that was all we could afford. We didn't factor in benefits to our calculations. Now I've one who graduated three years ago and one at university, I'm sad that I didn't have more but also glad as it's soooo expensive!!