The UK can’t afford to shatter dreams of parenthood

Families with disabled children are another group being pushed into poverty as a result.

This cap ensures that, with a few exceptions, families are ineligible for additional child tax credit or Universal Credit for any third or subsequent children. This, of course, gave rise to the notorious “rape clause” to exempt cases of what is euphemistically referred to as “non-consensual conception”.

Four short years ago Keir Starmer was hammering away at his keyboard to demand the scrapping of “punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap”. These days he’s busy emphasising that “with support comes expectations”, that “with Labour, if you can work, you will” and saying the two-child limit will be retained because his party “have to take the tough decisions” due to the state of the economy.

Apparently Starmer and co will be looking into making Tory policies “operate more fairly”, but fairness was one of the reasons cited for the policy being introduced to begin with. The UK Government stated that families receiving means-tested benefits would “face the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely through work”.

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That, of course, glossed over the fact that a choice to have children may be made in very different circumstances to those in which parents later find themselves.

The latest research has found that 25% of all households affected by the two-child limit are currently single-parent ones with a child under three, and 20% have at least one disabled child. The refusal of the core child element of Universal Credit for a third child applies even if that child is born with a disability.

The other, louder reason cited for capping benefits was to achieve a “rebalancing” of the welfare state and to “put the system on a more sustainable footing”. Looking at the tumbling birth rates across the UK, it’s difficult to understand how trying to limit the number of babies being born fits into any notion of long-term economic sustainability.

Herein lies a significant tension. Last month it emerged that the fertility rate in England and Wales had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1939. Campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed declared “procreation has become a luxury item in the UK” due to prohibitive childcare costs, and the head of a conservative think-tank said “we are essentially pricing people out of parenthood” thanks to factors including the housing crisis and “the poor availability of IVF on the NHS”.

There’s nothing “fair” about this situation. The correct response is not to try to limit the number of children “people on benefits” can have by threatening them with poverty, but to create a society in which all those who want to have children are able to do so without signing up for a lifetime of acute financial stress, chronic housing insecurity and relentless guilt about the quality of care being provided to their little ones.

It’s about decreasing demand for NHS-funded fertility treatments in middle age by creating the housing conditions that allow young adults to gain independence, rather than being forced into an extended adolescence living at home with their parents.

In a recent article headlined “Fears about falling birthrate in England and Wales are misplaced – the population is due to grow for years to come”, academics Melanie Channon and Bernice Kuang argue, quite rightly, that “individuals shouldn’t be responsible for controlling a country’s future population and economic prospects through childbearing”, while expressing some disapproval at those sounding the alarm about birth rates.

Of course no-one is suggesting that any individual should feel compelled to “breed for Britain”.

Fortunately there are plenty of people who would love to have families but for financial reasons feel justifiably bleak about their prospects of doing so. The authors, again quite rightly, argue that “policies should enable free and informed choice” but downplay the demographic time bomb the UK faces.

Despite the headline, they acknowledge that “migration is particularly hard to predict given how much it depends upon changing policies”. I may have missed Starmer’s announcement that he plans to tackle this time bomb – too many older people, far too few younger ones to support them – using immigration. If that is the plan, he’s been keeping quiet about it.

Retaining the two-child cap would be a dismal admission of defeat, sending the message that if working people can’t afford to have children, then non-workers (now or in the future) shouldn’t have more than two, and should be punished with poverty (along with those children) if they dare to defy that instruction.

The gaping fairness gulf is the one between the comfortable middle-aged and the despairing young for whom no amount of work is paying enough. The Tories are polling so poorly that Starmer could risk spelling that out. Unfortunately that’s one “tough choice” he’s unlikely to make.