Universal Credit: Two-child Limit

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, since the noble Viscount’s Government brought in the policy, he probably does not need me to remind him there are exceptions—for example, those involved in kinship care and those who have produced a child as a result of non-consensual conception, who can be exempted if they can produce evidence of having been raped and the conception being the result of that, or if they can find another way to account for that. However, this is not the driver behind the Government’s action. This Government want to make the lives of children and families better. I make no apologies for starting off by looking at the terrible rise in child poverty over the last 14 years, and I cheered the Prime Minister when one of his early actions was to set up a cross-government child poverty task force and a unit to look at the full range of drivers of that. If our children grow up in poverty, it has a scarring effect that they do not recover from. If we do nothing else in our time in government, we need to find a way to address this, and I hope this could eventually be the cross-party view.

During the last Labour Government, I worked in the Treasury advising Gordon Brown and had to tackle child poverty. We set up Sure Start and invested in all kinds of programmes, and I sat in this House and watched many of them being dismantled when I went into opposition. If we are going to find a way to make the country better for all our children, we surely need to agree on how we tackle child poverty and stop it recurring generation after generation.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, reference has already been made to the Children’s Commissioner’s report published yesterday, which gives voice to the experiences of children and young people in poverty. It makes for harrowing reading, including one boy who was faced with the choice of going hungry or eating mouldy food, and many other such difficult stories. Will the Minister commit to ensuring that all the Government’s work on welfare will be based on the human dignity and equal value of every person in this country?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for that, and, indeed, for the work that he and his colleagues do in this area. Like him, one of the reasons I was so glad to see the report, even though it is hard reading for the Government and for everyone, is that it talks about individual stories and the experience of individuals. There is always a risk when we are trying to make decisions at a macro level that we forget how they are experienced at the micro level of the individual. One of the things the task force has done is to have lots of encounters with families and children. It has worked with Save the Children to hear from children, and it has worked with the Children’s Commissioner. I was very grateful that, as part of the process, his colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby welcomed me to Derby to meet a range of faith organisations working on many different aspects and trying to join up the support given to families with children. His point about, in essence, the inalienable worth of every individual is one I am very happy to approve.