Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Baroness Teather Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Teather (LD) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech here during this Second Reading debate. Supporting children and tackling the impact of poverty and disadvantage have been core themes of my work, both in the other place and in my charity and NHS board roles since.

I will turn to the substance of the Bill in a moment and say some personal words about myself at the close. First, I hope noble Lords will indulge me in offering some heartfelt thanks. I am indebted to the many people who have guided me so patiently in my first few weeks. Having done my apprenticeship at the other end, this place is at once both familiar and very different. I am still navigating by reference to glimpses of green carpet that border red, meaning getting anywhere is taking me twice as long as it should.

I am particularly grateful to Black Rod’s team and to the doorkeepers, who made heroic efforts to support my husband, who is a wheelchair user, at my introduction, as they have today. He is here to listen, along with my parents, and I am very grateful to them for being here. I thank the clerks, the Lord Speaker, the attendants and my supporters—my noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lady Kramer—and the youthful staff team in the Lib Dem Whips Office, who are a daily source of facts, sanity and humour.

The Bill is hugely welcome. While some might say that it is not before time, I want instead to recognise the work done by the Minister in this House—the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock—and the Secretary of State in the other place to bring this Bill forward. I served as Children and Families Minister, and I recall the uphill task of co-ordinating child poverty strategy across departmental silos and coalition “differences of opinion” as somewhere between cat herding and global hostage negotiation—skills that might yet come in handy if we end up in protracted ping-pong here.

I am strongly of the view that the removal of the two-child limit in universal credit is the right thing to do. I have always been a sceptic about arbitrary caps in welfare policy, which seem often to be performative rather than strategic. People are made vulnerable when policy cannot flex for the complexity of real life. More than 1.5 million children are currently affected by the two-child limit, denied what they need to thrive and growing up where hunger, cold and uncertainty are daily realities; missing opportunities to join school trips and activities; and leaving them more likely to be bullied at school—something I know from my most recent role leading a children’s charity dedicated to that cause. Poverty affects children in every community, which was the premise behind targeted support through the pupil premium, but this two-child limit falls on regions unevenly and disproportionately on families from Black and ethnic-minority communities, baking in inequality and damaging life chances for decades.

Removing the two-child limit will make an impact on hundreds of thousands of children. But in the spirit of a maiden speech, I suggest gently that mitigation of its forerunner, the benefit cap, which interacts with the high cost of rented housing, might also be needed. This might be, for example, by reviewing the cap annually in line with the cost of living or disregarding child benefit from the total.

I want to say something about language and narrative. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s UK poverty report this year describes the impact of an increasingly toxic public debate on those living in poverty, saying that the

“values of compassion, justice and equity … are too often missing”.

Stigma and scapegoating really matter. Money fills the electric meter, buys the school uniform and pays for breakfast, but it is language that limits expectations, hardens attitudes and severs relationships.

I spent most of my decade-long civilian sabbatical away from politics leading a UK charity in the refugee sector, the Jesuit Refugee Service. I learned much at JRS about the way destitution and homelessness eat away at dignity, but also about the transformative power of relationships and community. Towards the end of my time at the charity, we started a new project to train staff in mediation skills, encouraging them to listen and engage in conversations locally and to learn from people with different, even opposing perspectives about our work. It was experimental in form, but the othering that we had witnessed had been so devastating that we were convinced that we must not contribute to it further.

Our potential to create change and solve problems in this polarised age depends on how well we collaborate with people who do not always share our worldview—resisting the urge to stereotype and being open to the idea that working with people we do not agree with might yield new solutions. One of the great joys of my first few weeks here has been the warm and fascinating conversations with noble Lords from different parties. This cross-party opportunity is a seam that I hope to mine.

I finish my remarks by sharing with noble Lords something very personal. I have spent most of my adult life working with and for people who are sidelined—those who struggle to get their voices heard and their experiences understood. Then, four years ago, I suddenly lost my voice. A random neurological hit knocked out a nerve to my vocal cords, leaving me struggling to speak. It took two years of speech and language therapy at Guy’s Hospital and specialist voice rehab to teach my body to adapt to this state and return a singing and useful voice—help for which I am deeply grateful.

The words of the Letters Patent read by the clerk at our introduction to this House confer on each of us a voice in this place. I understand the privilege of this gift—it is something that my body knows to be true. So I pledge to use my voice here to create space for all those whose voices continue to be silenced and whose experiences are missing from our deliberations. I hope to use my voice to enjoy as many cross-party conversations and collaborations as tea in the Long Room will sustain.