It comes amid calls from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to scrap the two-child benefit limit

A new poll shows that voters support calls to scrap the two-child benefit limit, a policy which charities and think tanks say has pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

The poll, carried out by Opinium, for Save the Children and shared exclusively with i, suggests that this would be a politically popular move for Labour, ‘with 39 per cent of the public claiming it would make them more likely to vote for whichever party made the pledge’.

It comes amid calls from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to scrap the two-child benefit limit, with the archbishop calling it a cruel and immoral policy that plunges hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

The two-child benefit cap prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. It was introduced by the former chancellor George Osborne in his austerity drive with the aim of encouraging parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours.

Charities and anti-poverty campaigners have over the years highlighted how the cruel and unfair policy has pushed thousands of children into poverty. Ending the two-child benefit cap would lift 250,000 children out of poverty, and lessen the effects of poverty on a further 850,000, according to the Child Poverty Action Group.

Gordon Brown has also called for the two-child benefit limit to be scrapped, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week that: “It’s not the third or the fourth child who is the only child that loses out. It’s every child because the average loss per family is about £60-per-week. A family on low pay or who is struggling can’t afford to lose £60-per-week,” he said.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives, however, have backed calls for the cap to be removed amid concerns that doing so would cost the Government around £2.5bn in 2024/25.

Over the weekend, Wes Streeting told Trevor Phillips he voted against the two-child limit when it was introduced, “so by definition, I wish it wasn’t there”.

But he echoed his party leader in saying the state of the public finances meant there are “harder choices to make”.

On the latest opinion poll on the matter, the ipaper reports: “According to the Opinium survey, 31 per cent of Conservative voters said a promise to scrap the two-child benefit cap would make them more likely to back whichever party made the pledge, compared to half of Labour and Lib Dem voters.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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