Universal Credit: Two-child Limit

Viscount Younger of Leckie Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a really important point, which is that we need as a country to make sure that we prioritise the cost of living and enabling people to earn enough. It should be possible to go out to work and earn enough to support your family, but that is one reason why we think it is important to invest in appropriate levels of social security. Crucially, we have to help people to develop skills. We want people to get into work, but we do not want them stuck on the lowest-paid work. We have increased the national minimum wage and invested in childcare and free school meals—we are doing all the things to make it possible to do the right thing. However, we need to go further. We need to see people in this country in higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs that will help them, grow our economy, and create opportunities for their children in due course.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, can I bring the House back to the original intention behind the two-child limit? It was to make the benefits system fairer to taxpayers who support themselves and their families solely through work. It encouraged parents on benefit to make the same financial choices about family size as those not on benefits. With the Government’s poverty argument in mind, the IFS has said that reversing the two-child limit is “not a silver bullet”. It said that the benefit cap will

“wipe out the gains for some children in the … poorest families”,

as 70,000 more households are affected by the cap. Surely supporting parents into work and into quality jobs is much more important for reducing child poverty. Finally, the IFS says that raising the employment rate to 80% from the current 75% would lift up to 350,000 children out of poverty.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, that is why the Government have set that as their target. I say to the noble Viscount that the whole point about this is that it is not a choice. It is not a question of either supporting children or helping parents to go into work. Supporting families makes work possible. Most parents want to work. Our job is to make that possible, so we have done that. We have invested in expanding free school meals to everyone on universal credit, including those in work; we have raised the national living wage, and we have put in more help for childcare—30 hours a week for parents of preschoolers—and more help for childcare in universal credit. Children deserve the best possible start in life and their parents deserve the best chance to have a decent life. We want to do both.