Challenging the Two-Child Limit on Family Benefits
- articlescsp
- Aug 4
- 4 min read
Welcome to the CSP blog space where we invite guest contributors to reflect on issues that intersect with their research, work or activism.
Challenging the Two-Child Limit on Family Benefits
Ruth Patrick and Tracey Jensen
The Labour Party was elected on a manifesto slogan of ‘change’ and promised to ‘leave no stone unturned’ when they launched their Child Poverty Taskforce in July 2024. Yet the promise of ‘change’ remains unrealised, child poverty continues to rise, and the Child Poverty Strategy (initially promised in Spring 2025) has been postponed until the autumn. What could explain this apparent procrastination on child poverty?
More than four million UK children are currently living in poverty. It is estimated that almost 1.7 million are impacted by the Two-Child Limit, which restricts means-tested social security support to the first two children in a household. The Two-Child Limit was introduced in 2017. Chancellor George Osborne claimed publicly that it would cut welfare spending, and compel parents to “face the same financial choices” around family size. Like other welfare reforms of that period, such as the Benefit Cap, the Two-Child Limit policy was framed as a tool for introducing ‘fairness’ between ‘workless’ and ‘hardworking’ households. Its introduction relied on, and reproduced, powerful and pervasive negative narratives around ‘welfare families’. Social security is attacked and rebranded as a system that creates a problem (‘welfare dependency’), encouraging people to have children they ‘can’t afford’ and expecting ‘the taxpayer’ to support them financially.
These are old, inaccurate, but effective, scripts about the welfare state and how it operates.
They have long histories and can be cleverly deployed in new contexts. Such reinvented welfare myths are powerful in contemporary public debate, and are utilised not only by policymakers, but in the mainstream media too. Across television screens and news sites, stories of welfare queens, fecund families and benefit broods have proliferated for many years, shaping and directing public consciousness and sentiment towards welfare reform. And all of this drives a powerful poverty and benefits stigma, which makes it more difficult for counter-narratives to appear and to be rooted in everyday experiences of hardship and adversity.
Both the benefit cap and two-child limit were judged to be electorally popular policies, even though researchers and campaigners warned that they would contribute to significant rises in child poverty. Indeed, a former Work and Pensions minister reports that when he expressed displeasure about the Benefit Cap he was told by Chancellor George Osborne’s then chief of staff Rupert Harrison: “I know it doesn’t make much in the way of savings but when we tested the policy it polled off the charts. We’ve never had such a popular policy.”
Fast forward to 2025 and the evidence continues to mount that the Two-Child Limit is a key driver in rising child poverty, reaching more and more children every day it remains in place. The charity Child Poverty Action Group estimates that 109 children are born into households affected by this one policy, each and every day. This policy is internationally unique; the UK is regarded as an outlier in terms of introducing policy which actually drives child poverty up.
All of this makes the Labour Government’s continued inaction on the Two-Child Limit especially troubling. At face value, it feels almost impossible to understand how and why the Two-Child Limit remains in place under a Labour government. On entering office, Labour did commit to a Child Poverty Taskforce, but they continue to prevaricate on the two-child limit’s removal, and continue to send mixed messages about whether or when they will take action. The Two-Child Limit and Benefit Cap have continuously ambushed the Labour party; positioned by the previous Government as ‘the welfare party’, tying themselves into defensive knots in an effort to be seen as ‘tough on welfare’. As much as punishing people in poverty, these policies have served as effective political weapons, trapping Labour on the wrong side of the argument.
Our article, ‘Challenging Welfare Mythmaking’, contributes to the growing body of evidence that details the cruelty of these policies. We analyse longitudinal qualitative data on households impacted by the Two-Child Limit and the Benefit Cap. By engaging with the lived experiences of families affected by these policies, we can immediately puncture the dominant narratives around welfare and reveal a much more complex picture of the structural drivers of poverty. We also see how the favoured term of ‘hardworking families’ - which did so much ideological work in terms of popularising poverty-producing policies - completely misrepresents the extensive work being done in households impacted by these policies.
Our analysis shows that there is a huge amount of very hard work going on in families living precariously, in poverty, compounded by the impacts of austerity and the introduction of new welfare reforms. This work is routinely done by women, and by women who are often in paid employment at the same time as requiring social security support to top up their inadequate wages.
There is an urgent need to recognise and prioritise these lived experiences, and to rethink how we conceptualise social reproductive labour and work more broadly. And we all need to push - with all our might - for Labour to finally do the right thing and to get rid of the cruel Two-Child Limit. There really can be no other way forward.