The cost of child poverty extends beyond the physical and emotional hardship felt by children growing up in low-income families.
This week the Labour government delivered a major achievement it can rightly be proud of. Through scrapping the two-child benefit cap, a cruel and inhumane policy brought in by the last Tory government, it lifted 450,000 children across the country out of poverty.
The two-child cap was introduced by George Osborne as Conservative chancellor. It bars families from claiming the £292.81-a-month child element of universal credit for third and subsequent children born after April 6, 2017.
According to the Child Poverty Action Group, every day it remained in place, 109 more children were pulled into poverty by the policy.
We’re the sixth-largest economy in the world and yet despite this, millions of children are growing up in poverty, a record that shames us as a nation.
Thankfully, the current Labour government is committed to lifting children out of poverty. Alongside scrapping the two child cap, it has extended free school meals and rolled out free breakfast clubs for primary schools, helping hard-pressed families.
So this week, I decided to highlight such a significant achievement on X, writing: “To those who claim ‘it doesn’t matter who you vote for they’re all the same’, this week the Labour govt scrapped the two-child benefit cap, lifting 450,000 children out of poverty.
“This govt is achieving the biggest reduction in child poverty over a Parliament since records began.”
It prompted an immediate wave of abuse and racist posts from X accounts, some of whom claimed to be supporters of Reform. They claimed it will ‘only benefit the children of migrants’, to blaming parents for being ‘lazy’. Of course, such abuse is to be expected on the X platform, given how little care Elon Musk has for combatting misinformation or hateful content on his platform.
It is disgraceful that some believe children should only be helped out of poverty depending on where they or their parents are born.
What was also telling was how many on the right responded with how lifting the two-child cap is a ‘burden for taxpayers’, given that it would cost around £3billion per year.
‘It’s being paid for by taxpayers’, replied a number of accounts, as though it were some kind of stunning revelation.
Of course the lifting of the cap will be funded by taxation, however what those on the right don’t want to mention is how children growing up in poverty costs the taxpayer billions more.
The cost of child poverty extends beyond the physical and emotional hardship felt by children growing up in low-income families.
As the Child Poverty Action Group highlights, there are also costs to the economy due to the greater risk of unemployment and lower earnings potential of adults who grow up in poverty, and the additional amount spent on public services to help address the damage done to children growing up in poverty.
In 2023, this economic and societal cost of children growing up in poverty was over £39 billion a year, up from £25 billion in 2008. Had the Labour government not acted the cost would’ve risen even more.
Yet the right don’t seem at all bothered about the cost of millions of children across the country growing up in poverty. Lifting the two-child cap is a small price to pay.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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