Families with more than two children experience a cap on their benefits, and we know that this is a key driver of poverty across the UK. Earlier this month, the Scottish government indicated it would take steps to mitigate the impact of this policy on families.
Barnardo’s has long said the cap is unfair and have called for it to end as an urgent first step in the UK government’s Child Poverty Strategy. We have been campaigning, alongside many others, for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted, and whilst we welcome the Scottish government’s announcement, we continue to urge the UK government to act urgently and end the two-child limit on benefits for all families across the UK.
The two-child limit on benefits for families with more than two children effectively operates as a sibling penalty, affecting families entitled to benefits who have had a baby since 2017. These parents are denied £3,235 per year per child, if they already had two children and have any more.
This cap pushes struggling families, most of whom are already in work, into poverty. We wouldn’t bar a third born child from receiving hospital treatment. We wouldn’t provide an education to the first two children, but deny it to the third. Yet, this is what the two-child limit on benefits does – it denies families the support they need to provide for their children when they need it the most.
According to the Scottish government’s figures, the abolition would lift around 15,000 children in Scotland out of poverty. However, the Scottish government did not set out any indication of how funding would work, noting it would need UK Government data from the Department of Work and Pensions to fully mitigate the cap.
The rollout is not planned until at least 2026. For us, the implementation of this policy does not come soon enough for children and families who are struggling right now, and although we support the ending of the two-child limit on benefits, there are also several other crucial policy steps that we are calling on the Scottish government to take to tackle child poverty.
Whilst the Scottish government also made additional commitments to fund a pilot programme of free school breakfast provision and progress with the introduction of free school meals for older primary school pupils in receipt of the Scottish Child Payment – a weekly payment of £26.70 for every child under 16 that is in foster or residential care – they stopped short of confirming a rollout of universal free school meals for all primary school pupils and increasing the Scottish Child Payment to £30.
At Barnardo’s, our aim is that children, young people and families are safe, happy, healthy and hopeful. The recent Scottish Budget contained some positive moves in line with those aims, notably the intended abolition of the two-child cap, but it is also clear that more actions will be needed to tackle child poverty.
We urge both the UK and Scottish governments to work together to tackle child poverty – and we continue to urge the UK Government to scrap the two-child limit on benefits as soon as possible. Families can’t wait any longer for support and children deserve immediate and long-term solutions to give them the best chance in life.
