By Alistair Smout and Sachin Ravikumar
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s Labour government is considering whether to abolish a two-child limit on welfare payments to parents as it reassesses several unpopular policies to reverse a slide in its poll ratings, in the second potential policy shift in as many weeks.
Labour suffered a bruising set of local election results earlier this month after less than a year in power, losing ground to Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party, which also now leads in national opinion polls and has challenged Labour on its spending decisions.
Last week Prime Minister Keir Starmer signalled he was open to reversing a cut in winter fuel payments to the elderly, and the government is now considering whether to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which think tanks and critics say fuels poverty.
Asked if the government would scrap the cap, which was introduced by the Conservative government in 2017, Education Minister Bridget Phillipson said: “It’s on the table.”
“No measures are off the table,” she told Times Radio, adding that a child poverty taskforce was looking at “lots of ways” to tackle the issue and could not ignore the impacts of the policy.
Starmer’s spokesperson said the taskforce would consider all available levers, but would not comment on possible individual measures.
Labour cut winter fuel payments and refused to scrap the two-child benefit cap after being elected in July, arguing the spending reductions were necessary to fix a hole in government finances left by the previous Conservative administration.
“Everything the government does has to be affordable,” Starmer’s spokesperson told reporters, saying those “difficult decisions” had stabilised public finances after the election.
The Resolution Foundation think tank said it would cost up to 4.5 billion pounds ($6.10 billion) to scrap the two-child cap, about a fifth of the 22 billion-pound “black hole” fiscal shortfall that Labour cited after the election.
It said full abolition would be more cost-effective to lift children out of poverty than tweaks to the cap.
Labour has pledged to stick to non-negotiable fiscal rules and in July suspended seven lawmakers for six months for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, with those lawmakers noting that ministers who had severely criticised them now appeared to agree with them.
The challenge to Starmer over the policy has not just come from his party’s left, with Reform leader Farage saying the “right thing to do” was to ditch the cap, to support families and make the lives of lower-paid British workers easier.
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(Reporting by Alistair Smout, Sachin Ravikumar and Andy Bruce; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
