Britain's cruel war on single mums must end. It's time to scrap the two-child limit and benefit cap

Rachel Reeves has indicated that she’s set to scrap the two-child limit later this month in her autumn budget statement but as the founder of the campaign group Single Parent Rights, I will be concerned how far this commitment goes until I hear the announcement of a full scrapping of both the two-child limit and the benefit cap.

The choice is really quite simple: allow child poverty to grow unchecked, or lift 400,000 children out of poverty and put a stop to its seemingly never ending expansion by scrapping the two child limit and the benefit cap.

The UK is the sixth richest economy in the world, but it remains the only country to limit means-tested benefits to two children. These policies are touted as incentives to ‘get people back to work’ and yet they do no such thing. Instead, they sustain the tired, mythical image of the “single mum benefit scrounger”.

Read more:

• I’m a working mum earning a decent salary – but the two-child limit on benefits hits my family too
• After growing up in poverty, I know the anger 4.5 million children must feel
• Benefit cap puts single mothers like me at risk of homelessness and destitution

People often assume that the benefit cap only affects people who don’t work – after all, that’s how it’s framed by many politicians and much of the media. The truth is very different. Families earning up to £845 a month can still be capped meaning their social security payments are cut. For thousands of families this equates to losing out on more than £150 a week.

This includes single mothers on maternity leave who are legally barred from working. I’m not sure what’s more absurd, that the government punishes people for not working when they legally can’t work, or that policy continues to be shaped around a stereotype that doesn’t exist?

Look closer and the bias is clear. The earnings requirement to avoid the benefit cap is identical for a single parent as it is for a couple. Meaning – in effect – a single mother must earn twice as much to avoid being penalised. The result? More than two-thirds of families whose benefits are capped are headed by single mothers.

That’s over 85,000 single parent families struggling to make ends meet because they are punished for not working enough when they are already doing one of the hardest jobs of them all: raising children often with very little support. Many families fall into rent arrears and many ultimately end up in a cycle of poor quality temporary accommodation. 

Officially, work requirements for the ‘main carer’ on universal credit begin when the youngest child turns three. But for single parents, the benefit cap makes that rule redundant. Instead, single mothers are essentially forced to work as soon as their baby arrives if they want to be protected from the impact of the cap. It’s no wonder then that half of all single mothers affected by the policy have a child aged just three years or under.

If this policy was genuinely intended to encourage people into work, then it’s a spectacular failure. Cutting income makes life harder for parents, not easier. It pushes impacted families further away from employment, not closer.

This isn’t just about the economic impact of this policy. It’s about the message it sends to society about single mothers. Families with children are overwhelmingly impacted by the cap – 82% of capped households include children. But it is single parents bearing the brunt. They make up 83% of those households. Why are single parents legitimate targets for punitive systems that couples are afforded some (granted, not full) protection from?

Every child deserves the same chance to grow up free from poverty regardless of their background or the number of parents in their home. Scrapping the two-child limit would ease poverty for many families, but without also lifting the benefit cap, too many families will see no real change. Once again, it will be single parents who make up the bulk of those left behind.

On 26 November, Rachel Reeves faces a clear choice: cling to punitive myths and ineffective policies or listen to the evidence and end the injustice facing Britain’s children once and for all. Scrapping just one of these policies alone, or tweaking them around the edges, would be like pressing the accelerator while the handbrake is still on. That’s why it’s critical the government scraps both the two-child limit and the benefit cap in full next week.

Ruth Talbot is the founder of the campaign group Single Parent Rights.

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