'We’re dealing with a wrong diagnosis of the poverty problem, poverty used to be related to unemployment, it’s now low pay.'
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has once more reiterated his call for the government to drop what he has described as the ‘cruel’ two-child benefit cap, which he says is a significant driver of child poverty in the UK.
In an interview with Robert Peston, Brown said that ‘the cost-effective way of getting more children out of poverty, about 500,000 children out of poverty, is abolishing the two-child limit.’
He added: “What the Conservatives did was introduce a ban on any third child in a benefits family getting that £66 a week that they need to bring up their child. So if you’re in a two-child family you get £132 a week but if you’re in a three-child family, you only get £132 and that means you’ve only got £40 or so to bring up the child.”
Brown said the policy was unfair because it discriminates against the third child.
The two-child cap, which was introduced in 2017, restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households.
The former Labour leader also said that the two-child cap was wrong because ‘the reason people are in poverty is not because people are feckless and work shy and not dependent, 70% of those children who are in poverty are in working families where people simply don’t earn enough a week to be able to bring up the children.”
He went on to say: “And equally when it comes to the two-child rule, 60% of children caught by the two-child rule are in working families.”
“And the others are families where someone is temporarily unemployed or sick, or incapacitated for some reason, or mothers just can’t afford the childcare that’s necessary for them to be able to go out to work.
“We’re dealing with a wrong diagnosis of the poverty problem, poverty used to be related to unemployment, it’s now low pay.”
The Labour government has said that it is not prepared to make “unfunded promises” by abolishing the cap.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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