Helen Whately is the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Tonight, once again, Labour MPs will vote to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Conservatives will vote to defend it.
With Labour’s majority – and the enthusiastic support of the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru – the outcome of this third reading vote is not in doubt – provided everyone goes in the correct voting lobby.
But the debate matters.
Because what MPs say about the two-child cap reveals far more than their view on a single policy. It shows how they think about the role of the state and the family, about fairness and responsibility, and ultimately about what makes our country succeed.
The fact that most MPs will vote to scrap the two-child cap is why there is so little prospect of our country’s fortunes being turned around this Parliament.
The UK is in trouble.
Our economy is in the doldrums. Growth is stagnant. Businesses are in despair. Entrepreneurs are asking, ‘why bother?’ Unemployment is up month on month, and youth unemployment is at similar levels to Greece. The only areas of growth are public sector jobs and pay.
Politicians have failed to make – or win – the case for controlling public spending and backing private enterprise. Too often, governments have succumbed to pressure to spend more because it seems on-the-face of it compassionate.
But the cumulative effect is anything but compassionate. We’ve drifted onto an unsustainable path of ever-higher spending and ever-lower growth.
Making the whole country poorer may narrow relative poverty – which appeals to the Left – but it doesn’t actually improve people’s lives.
With the working-age benefits bill at £140 billion per annum, and with the government borrowing £112 billion in the financial year to January 2026, MPs should not be voting to spend billions and billions more on benefits. That will just dig our economic hole deeper.
Like most of the choices Labour have made in Government, it’s a bad one – so bad, even Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves argued that the country couldn’t afford it. But Keir has caved in to pressure from Labour MPs to spend ever more. Part of his underlying weakness.
However, even if the economic situation was better, I still wouldn’t support scrapping the cap.
For most people, raising children is the most important thing they will ever do. Paying for them is why parents work long hours and make sacrifices. Many couples have difficult conversations about how many children they can afford. It is fundamentally unfair to make them fund choices they themselves cannot afford to make.
Labour MPs say it’s wrong for children to suffer because of their parents’ decisions. But that exposes a deeper divide – over the role of the state. Except in cases of abuse or neglect, it is not the state’s job to raise children.
The Government is busy increasing hand-outs to parents on benefits, all the while undermining the fundamental responsibility you have as a parent which is to provide for your family – and making it ever harder for households paying their own way to match the incomes of those who do.
A single parent on Universal Credit with five children could receive an extra £10,000 as a result of this Bill, taking their household income to over £45,000, untaxed. That’s without assuming any extra help like sickness benefits or carers allowance. To match that, someone in work would need to earn around £60,000. I said entrepreneurs are saying ‘why bother?’, but so are plenty of people who’re doing everyday jobs too.
Giving households an income from benefits that exceeds what many could hope to earn in work is obviously wrong – not only unfair to taxpayers, but also a clear disincentive to work and contribute to our economy. Yet that is the path the Government is doubling down on.
Taking a different tack, some MPs may say they’re backing lifting the cap to boost the UK birth rate. That’s something I’m concerned about too, but the answer to the complex problem of why people are choosing to have fewer children (or none) is not giving money to parents on benefits when they have more.
That was the reason Reform originally said they would back lifting the cap. It turned out to be unpopular – and now they’ve U-turned to keeping the cap on the basis of affordability i.e., if there was more money in the Treasury coffers, they would be spending it. Their own economic spokesperson voted to scrap the two-child benefit cap just two weeks ago.
Quite apart from their inability to stick to a policy with just eight MPs and none of the pressures of Government, for those who think Reform are really Conservatives by another name, this is a pointer that they are not. They don’t share our ambition to rein in the state, their view is; ‘if only we could spend more we would’.
And frankly, it’s that way of thinking that has got us to such a desperate economic situation that thousands of young people are now leaving each year to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
I do care about the conditions children are growing up in, but the best way to improve those is for people to have jobs and our economy to be growing. Not by expanding the state and spending more on benefits.
While other parties compete to be more generous with other people’s hard-earned cash, Conservatives believe something different.
We believe children are better off when the country is better off. When there are more jobs, lower inflation and wages that rise because the economy is growing.
Throughout history, our living standards have risen when people were free – and motivated – to strive. When ideas were turned into businesses, hard work was rewarded, and families could improve their own circumstances.
That is how countries get ahead. Not by taking more and more from those who succeed or who stand on their own two feet. We need the effort, innovation and enterprise of millions of people if we are to turn things around.
Conservatives believe in a country where work pays. Responsibility is rewarded. And where welfare is a safety net – not a lifestyle choice. That is the difference. Not just over the two-child cap. But over the future direction of Britain itself.
As you can see, those aliases are in order:
