Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Amanda Hack Excerpts

2nd reading & Money resolution
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

Of the measures brought forward in this Government’s Budget last year, the abolition of the two-child limit is the one that most fills me with hope and more than a little pride, so I thank the Government for listening to so many of us who raised this issue as a concern.

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has reminded us, child poverty is not just about children going hungry once in a while, or not being able to buy the designer trainers they want. For every 1% increase in child poverty, more babies die before their first birthday. In fact, this causal link has been quantified, and it amounts to 5.8 additional deaths per 100,000 live births. A baby born into a poor family is five times more likely to die than a baby born into a wealthy one. I ask Opposition Members to consider that when they make their interventions and speeches.

If such children are lucky enough to survive their first year, they will be more likely to suffer poor physical and mental ill health and more likely to end up as an emergency hospital admission. The impacts on their neurological development as they grow are profound. How the brain makes its neural connections changes because of the stress and adversity that children go through. In turn, that affects behaviour, cognitive development and achievements in school. These disadvantages continue into adolescence and adulthood, so every aspect of children’s lives is affected.

We are rightly concerned about the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training, and nearly 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds are NEETs. We must look at the evidence for why that is, not just jump to conclusions for political expediency. There is strong evidence from the UK millennium cohort study that persistent exposure to poverty and childhood adversity, including poor parental mental health, means that such people are five times more likely to be NEET. It is estimated that more than half—nearly 53%—of current NEET cases are attributable to persistent exposure to poverty and childhood adversity. It is not because young people fancy a duvet day, and I really think it is disgraceful that such phrases are repeated in the media. This pattern goes on right through adolescence and young adulthood, and it affects people’s earning capacity, as we have heard.

When in government, the Conservatives were warned repeatedly. I was a shadow Work and Pensions Minister, and I represented the Labour party during the passage of the original legislation, so I know they had repeated warnings. I chaired an all-party parliamentary group that raised the issue, and we engaged with the Faculty of Public Health, which did an impact analysis to identify the harms that would take place. We also did a retrospective analysis to show the damage the policy was having. That legislation introduced not only the two-child limit and the benefit cap, but the benefit freeze—we must not forget the benefit freeze—and the harms those policies have caused to the lives of children, who are now our young adults, are absolutely shameful.

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

This issue is one of the things we have looked at in the Work and Pensions Committee, and the evidence is quite clear that we must remove the two-child benefit cap and enable long-term investment in our young people. Those young people in poverty suffer extraordinarily, and we need to give them better life chances.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend is a wonderful member of the Select Committee, and I thank her for that. In particular, she is very active on our joint inquiry with the Education Committee.

In the space of the 15 years between 2010 and when we were elected in 2024, child poverty escalated from 3.9 million children, or 29%, to 4.3 million, or 31%. To go back to the calculation at the beginning of my speech, the impact on families that have been bereaved as a consequence of the unfortunate position they found themselves in financially should not be underestimated. Like many of us, I have constituents who have grown up under the clouds and chains of austerity, while clinging on to the hope that things could get better. That hope is why we are here on these Labour Benches, and we know how important what we are now doing is in rebuilding trust with the people who invested their vote in us and trusted us to deliver for them.

I cannot thank the Government enough for doing this, but as has been said, it is a down payment and there needs to be more. We can overturn the horrors of the last 15 years. We have done so in the past, and we can again. We have prepared the ground for a better Britain, and this year we will start to see children and their families flourish, but I recognise that this is only the first step. We are lifting 450,000 to 500,000 children out of poverty, which is fantastic, but that is only about 10% of all the children living in poverty, and we need to have our eyes on the remaining 90%. This is an important first step, but we must say that it is only the first step.

The Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and I are looking forward to exploring just how we can do more. As I have previously said, we need to be thinking beyond individual departmental budgets. Tackling child poverty needs a whole-system Government approach, which includes how we budget and how the Office for Budget Responsibility scores Budgets. We need to use evidence much better in our policy planning. Our impact analyses are very narrow, and do not reflect how people experience poverty and the impacts that that has not just on the DWP, but on other Departments. That needs to change.

Finally, when unequivocal evidence is presented to us—some of the evidence is only just emerging; the UK millennium cohort study that I mentioned came on stream only in the last six or seven months—it is right that we respond to it. That is a strength, not a weakness, and it demonstrates humility and integrity. Poverty and inequality are not inevitable; they are political choices driven by values, and when the evidence changes, so should our decisions.