In 2017, having already implemented swingeing cuts to people on benefits, former Chancellor George Osborne decided that families should be punished a little bit more. He put in place a limit to the number of children in a family on means-tested benefits who would be entitled to benefits for a third or fourth child. While not quite China’s one-child policy, Osborne’s two-child limit made it clear that poorer families should not reproduce (while richer families should go right ahead).
The two-child limit also brought about the infamous ‘rape clause’, where people unfortunate enough to conceive after a rape or in a coercive relationship would have to inform the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) so that they could allow them a third child’s support money, as long as the child came about directly as a result of the assault.
The DWP has now released some facts and figures about how the two-child policy has gone and there are some devastating insights in its report.
The numbers
592,000 children live in homes affected by the two-child cap on benefits, with 156,540 households affected in total. There were just 73,000 households affected last year. 510 applied for an exemption based on the ‘rape clause’, making up almost 10% of exemptions, and the majority of families (59%) affected have adults in work.
Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, told Politics Home, “Every child deserves a good start in life, but today’s figures are a grim reminder of the human cost of this nasty policy, which says that some children are more deserving than others purely on the basis of their birth order – and which mostly affects working families.
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“In the UK we would never turn a third-born child away from school or hospital. How can it be right to deny the same young children the support they need to enjoy a childhood free from poverty when their family falls on hard times?”
The ethics
It is unethical and cruel to fail to support a family’s third child when children numbers one and two are looked after, just because of the means-tested benefits that family is in receipt of. While there may be many good reasons, such as the environment, to have fewer children, targeting only poorer families means this is unjustifiable when you consider that richer families can have as many children as they like and will not be penalised for it.
Many people do not plan to end up on benefits. If they lose their job or their income falls into poverty levels, they may find that their existing children are penalised. If they cannot admit to having been raped, especially to nameless, hostile admin staff who require them to fill out a form about it, they will be penalised. If they have an unplanned pregnancy and don’t want to terminate it, they will be penalised.
The shortage of money means that families are cutting back on essentials such as food, utility usage such as gas and electricity, clothing and activities outside of school. The third child does not know they are the one not being paid for, but the impact of the £53 a week cut is felt by the entire family.
In work vs out of work
The fact that 59% of the families affected by the two-child limit have been in work has been mentioned in every aspect of coverage of this story that I could find. I mentioned it above, myself. There is a strong – and correct – feeling that if somebody is in work, they should not be in such poverty that they require benefits to top up their income.
Why is the minimum wage not sufficient to pay their bills? Why are companies being essentially subsidised by the government to pay as little as they want, while the government tops up the amount lacking as Universal Credit or Housing Benefit, for instance?
The minimum wage being a realistic living wage is so important if people are to have a chance to raise themselves out of poverty and the government should stop pandering to private industries by keeping the minimum wage at an inadequate rate that serves nobody except the capitalists.
However, we should be just as outraged that families where nobody is in work are suffering because of the two-child cap. Just because nobody is able to work, through sickness or disability, or because nobody can find work, because of instability around Brexit or the myriad other causes of unemployment, or because nobody can find suitable work that suits their ethics, such as vegans not being willing to work in an abattoir, does not mean that these families should be treated with any less respect than those where one or more adults are working.
Just because people are sick or unable or even – I’ll say it – unwilling to take up the jobs available to them does not mean that they should be considered to be in ‘justifiable’ poverty.
There is no justification for poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. As it is, we have a shameful north-south divide and we have shameful levels of poverty and the two-child cap, including its rape clause, are heartless contributors to these statistics.
Photo: Garry Knight