Child Poverty Strategy (Removal of Two Child Limit)

Peter Bedford Excerpts

1st reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bedford (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)]

Before I begin, I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) for introducing the ten-minute rule Bill today. While we may not agree on the Bill, I believe that this House is at its best when Members argue for what they believe in, and I am glad we have the opportunity to do so today.

My Conservative colleagues and I cannot support this Bill. We oppose it because we fundamentally believe in two core principles: fairness and personal responsibility. I believe that this Bill undermines both. Let us be clear: this debate is not about the principle of child benefit. As the eldest of three children from a single-parent family, I know from my own lived experience the challenges faced by those in genuine poverty—having to scrabble around at the end of the week to find enough money to keep the electricity meter running, having to go next door to borrow a cup of sugar to make it to the end of the week, and having to go without the basics at school that most of my friends had. Every child deserves the best start in life, and we should support that, but what is being proposed is something entirely different.

The Bill seeks to remove the two-child benefit cap—a cap introduced by the previous Government to address a spiralling bill in a welfare system that was, at times, being abused. Such a cap is fair to the hard-pressed taxpayer. Why should individuals already in receipt of state support gain additional benefit for having yet more children, while working families who get up early, pay their taxes and take full responsibility for their lives do not? Removing the cap would not foster fairness. Instead, it would penalise the people we should be championing: working families who play by the rules. It is only the Conservative party that is standing up for those families, promoting individual responsibility and protecting the country’s fragile finances.

Meanwhile, Members on the Government Benches—not content with the chaos they have recently inflicted on the nation—are now competing to be the most socialist, declaring their support for scrapping the cap despite knowing full well it will cost the country an eye-watering £4.5 billion a year. We must be honest with the British people: removing the two-child cap is a massive unfunded commitment that does not reward people for doing the right thing.

Simply put, I ask the House: why should a small business owner in Mid Leicestershire, who is already burdened with additional taxes, be asked to pay even more to support someone else’s children, especially when they are struggling to support their own? At the heart of this matter is a philosophical debate. As Conservatives, we believe in incentivising work, not penalising those who seek it. We do not consign people to a life of state dependency; we encourage them to strive, to achieve and to be the best they can be.

Unfortunately, it is not just those on the Government Benches who are promoting this recklessness. The Green party wants to spend £40 billion on its radical net zero agenda while still backing the two-child cap’s removal, and the SNP wants to add billions to their welfare bill by pursuing an open borders immigration policy paid for by hard-working Scots. Most surprisingly of all, though, is Reform UK’s position. Many of their hon. Members are proud Thatcherites—or so I thought. They appear to have undergone a damascene conversion and are now, I believe, backing scrapping the cap—a policy that would hammer hard-working ordinary white van men across the country. As we approach what would have been Mrs Thatcher’s centenary, I can only imagine what she would have to say about such an anti-aspirational and profligate approach to the public finances. Politicians simply cannot claim to want to reduce the welfare bill while pursuing policies that would push that bill up by billions.

Let me speak directly to the British public, who are inherently conservative-minded: if your political beliefs are rooted in economic freedom and low taxation, can you really support parties that want to take your hard-earned money and hand it to those unwilling to take responsibility? Only the Conservative party stands with you. We believe in letting people keep more of the money they have earned. We believe in addressing poverty at its roots, not just by writing cheques but by reforming the system that traps people in dependency.

Our approach is clear. A future Conservative Government will stop sickness benefits for foreign nationals, fix the UK’s sick note culture and reintroduce face-to-face assessments to stop people gaming the system, as the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), has said. We need to bring about a cultural shift where work, personal responsibility and self-reliance are once again core to our national ethos. As I said at the Work and Pensions Committee last week, we should not blindly throw money at the welfare system. We must instead highlight the importance of getting a job, promote better financial management and uphold a meritocratic system where hard work always triumphs over idleness.

The Conservatives will vote against this Bill. We are the only party telling the uncomfortable truth about our out-of-control welfare system and the serious financial realities facing our country. We owe it to our constituents to protect the public purse, we owe it to hard-working families to uphold fairness, and we owe it to future generations to build a society built not on entitlement but on effort, enterprise and aspiration.

Question put (Standing Order No. 23).