Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Western]

This Government are acting now. We have already announced that all children in families in England that are in receipt of universal credit will receive free school meals, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty. We have capped the cost of school uniforms, and introduced a new crisis and resilience fund. Our Child Maintenance Service reforms will lift 20,000 children out of poverty, and much more will be done when the child poverty taskforce reports later this year.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Despite what those on the far right try to claim, the cost of living crisis remains the main issue that people face. One way to really help struggling families would be to lift the two-child benefit cap—that would lift hundreds of thousands of children across the country out of poverty, including many in my constituency. Is it not the case that the forthcoming Budget should announce that the two-child benefit cap will be scrapped?

[Andrew Western]

My hon. Friend will understand that I am not going to make policy from the Dispatch Box. What I would say to him, as I have already said to the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan), is that all available levers are under consideration as part of our child poverty taskforce, which will report later this year. We will do what it takes to bear down on child poverty. There are many levers that we can look at using to do so; we have pulled some already, and we will continue that work.