Labour’s child poverty strategy is a great step forward

Sir Keir Starmer is right to make a big show of the government’s decision to restore the child element of universal credit to families with more than two children. He and the rest of the Labour Party are right to be proud of the reduction in child poverty that will follow.

The decision was announced in the Budget last week. The wider child poverty strategy was unveiled on Friday. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary who led the formulation of the strategy, will make a statement in parliament next week. This is a decision that the Labour government wants people to notice, and an argument in which it wants to engage, according to The Independent.

There is an argument to be had. Opinion polls suggest that the two-child benefit limit, introduced by George Osborne as chancellor and applying to children born since April 2017, is popular. In the abstract, people should not have children if they cannot afford to provide for them.

But in reality, there are all kinds of reasons why larger families fall on hard times: relationships break down; illness or death strikes; jobs are lost. And it is worth making the point, as the prime minister does repeatedly, that three-quarters of children in poverty are in working families.

The decisive argument, in The Independent’s view, is that children should not suffer for the decisions of their parents. No one asks to be born, and however much the general public might disapprove of irresponsible parenting, it is wrong to punish the child.

We should be pleased, therefore, that the collective resources of society are being deployed to improve the quality of life and the life chances of around half a million children.

The government’s anti-poverty strategy does not consist of lifting the two-child limit alone, which is also welcome. The government calculates that 450,000 children will be raised above the poverty line by the abolition of the two-child cap on universal credit and other benefits — at a cost of £3.5bn — and that a further 100,000 will be taken out of poverty by the expansion of free school meals, help with energy bills and subsidised childcare.

We have some sympathy with the views of David Blunkett, the former home secretary, who argued that instead of lifting the two-child limit altogether, it might be lifted for the third child and that some of the money be diverted to reviving New Labour’s Sure Start centres. But that is a fairly minor point, given that children’s “hubs”, resembling Sure Start, are also being expanded.

The government is less entitled to claim credit, meanwhile, for promising to fund more temporary accommodation in order that local councils can meet their statutory responsibilities — that sounds like something that should be done anyway.

The larger problems with the government’s policy choices are that almost all the extra public spending in the Budget is being added to the welfare bill, while labour market policies are making it harder for people to be lifted out of poverty by work.

Welfare spending should be curbed by balancing higher spending on tackling child poverty with a rigorous attempt to slow down the growth in spending on disability benefits. As for the labour market, a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy, of which a child poverty strategy should be a part, must do more to get people off welfare and into work. Instead, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has made choices that make it harder, especially for young people and those on low wages, to find work. The rise in employers’ national insurance contributions was skewed towards the costs of hiring lower-paid employees, while the rise in the minimum wage adds to the cost of new hires, and the Employment Rights Bill will add to the non-wage costs and risks.

But this child poverty strategy is a big step in the right direction that will, by the end of this parliament, make a material difference to hundreds of thousands of children’s lives, and to the lives of their parents. This is, at last, one area in which this Labour government really is making a welcome change.