‘It’s put so many families in poverty’: people on the impact of the two-child benefit cap

Keir Starmer has launched a cross-government taskforce to tackle child poverty, but backbench Labour MPs are calling for the government to go further and scrap the two-child benefit cap. Here people reveal how the limit affects their families.

Alicia* is a mother of four children in Newcastle, and is separated from their father. She does everything she can to avoid going to collect a parcel from a food bank. She will often buy a big sack of potatoes and cook them in different ways throughout the week – jacket potatoes, fried chips, wedges – so her kids get variation. She often skips breakfast and lunch herself.

“I’ll leave myself empty the whole day,” she says, because turning up at the food bank, which she started last August, makes her feel ashamed, as if she’s “worthless as a mother”.

Last Wednesday, money was too stretched, so Alicia went to pick up a parcel from the pantry: bread buns, fresh apples and oranges near their sell-by date, potatoes and juice, nappies and baby wipes. At the food bank, she tries to get in and out swiftly, “hiding my face so other parents won’t recognise me”.

“For me, I couldn’t care, it’s more, I don’t want my kids to be judged at school.”

Alicia is one of several people who spoke to the Guardian after responding to an online call-out about the impact of the two-child benefit limit on their families.

Because Alicia’s two youngest children were born after 6 April 2017, they are affected by the two-child benefit cap: a policy brought in by the Conservative government that prevents parents from claiming child-tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after that date. Alicia gets £621.25 a month as support for her first two children, but nothing for the youngest two. The policy costs families like hers £3,455 a year a child. Last year, about 450,000 households and 1.6 million children were affected, according to the latest official figures.

The SNP has tabled an amendment to the king’s speech to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which has received cross-party support from the Green party, the SDLP, Plaid Cymru, the Alliance party and independent MPs including Jeremy Corbyn.

According to the Child Poverty Action Group, removing the cap would cost about £1.7bn, representing roughly 0.14% of total government spending in 2024-25, and lift 300,000 children out of poverty.

With four growing children, Alicia has to “juggle whose clothes I’m going to buy” in her monthly budget. Currently out of work, when the kids go to sleep Alicia applies for jobs. She is struggling to find employment that will fit around her children’s needs – the youngest two only get 15 hours of funded childcare a week.

“Labour should scrap the two-child limit because it is unfair and it’s put so many families in child poverty,” says Alicia.

Related: Where’s the cash for child hunger? Labour is running out of time to find it | Frances Ryan

In St Helens, Merseyside, Angelica has four children and lives with her husband. She gets universal credit support for her first three children, aged 18, 12 and nine, but not for her six-year-old because they were born after the policy was introduced. Angelica says the two-child benefit cap is “shameful” and a “symbol of discrimination” that, she feels, rolls back the human rights of children.

Angelica says her caring responsibilities for her nine-year-old son, who is autistic, mean the family needs to pay upkeep for a car and buy specific dietary items – costs that have helped push Angelica’s family into debt. Her husband now has two jobs to help pay the debt off.

She says people think poverty is something from the 19th century or novels by Charles Dickens but fail to see “it’s still happening”.

Jane, a 41-year-old mother to two boys aged 10 and seven in Sheffield, remembers the day she got a leaflet about the two-child cap featuring an image of a smiling family of four. The jovial tone of the pamphlet “felt like such a slap in the face”.

Jane, one of three herself, and her husband had always imagined raising three kids. “There’s something lovely about having three little faces in the back of the car,” she says. But the financial difficulty of not getting support and the high cost of nurseries – alongside other factors such as a difficult birth – made the couple take the tough decision not to have another baby.

“It just felt like a hostile environment to be bringing a third child into,” Jane says.

Katherine and her husband, who live in the south-east with two children, aged 17 and 13, faced a daunting choice of their own: after Katherine’s contraception failed and they conceived a third child in 2020, their financial struggles and the prospect of no extra support was a big factor in terminating the pregnancy.

After falling into financial problems a few years ago, Katherine says she and her husband, who works for the local authority, were forced to use a food bank and sell possessions and furniture. She was nervous about experiencing this again.

“It wasn’t an easy decision at all; I feel like we both wanted to have this child,” she says. “It will always stay with us.”

It took a toll on her mental health. After ending the pregnancy, there were times when Katherine says she internalised her feelings and felt like “a personal failure”. It was only when she read data on the reasons people get abortions in the UK – one survey found 57% of women cited financial pressures as a major consideration for terminations – she realised the scale of the problem.

“Why, in the 21st century, in a rich country, are people struggling to afford to have families?” says Katherine, who has struggled with rental arrears this year. “It shouldn’t be like that … I hope Labour can govern with a more humane approach and will end the two-child cap.”

* Names have been changed on request to protect anonymity.