‘Labour is lifting 450,000 children out of poverty – Reform would rather cut 5p off a pint of beer’

CHALLENGING TIMES: Newland Avenue in Hull. One in three children in the city live in real poverty

OPINION

By Dame Diana Johnson, Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham and Minister of State for Employment at the Department of Work and Pensions

The vast majority of parents want to support their children through working for a living, paying their way and standing on their own two feet.

Doing this has been challenging for many in recent years, especially for those in lower paid work, who have found that the cost-of-living crisis has stretched family budgets beyond breaking point – with rising bills from utilities to food shopping.

That’s why this Government is acting on many fronts to make work pay, to reduce family bills and to fight the scourge of child poverty.

This week, Labour MPs voted through a change in the law to remove the policy introduced by the Tories in 2017 to restrict social security benefits to only the first two children in a family.

From April, this will take 450,000 children out of poverty. This is not a blank cheque – the overall benefits cap remains – but it will mean the biggest-ever reduction of child poverty in a single Parliament.

Under the Tories, 900,000 more children were deliberately plunged into poverty – taking it to a grim total of 4.5 million. In Hull one in three children live in real poverty. We have seen the results in surging Food Bank dependency over the past decade – in families forced to choose eating or heating.

Not everyone wants to change this.

This week, Reform UK joined the Tories in opposing the removal of the two-child cap after previously signalling that they supported it. Nigel Farage stated that he would reinstate the Tory two-child limit on benefits to pay for a 5p cut in a pint of beer.

In doing so, he is playing very nasty and divisive politics with the life chances of children in poverty in Hull and around the country. Let’s get a few facts straight.

Firstly, we have been the only country in the world to have this two-child limit.

Secondly, there is the horrific rape clause. This meant that a woman had to prove that a child was born as a result of rape to get any help for her child, if it was her third-born.

Thirdly, the Tories said that the two-child limit was supposed to deter families on benefits from having more children, but punishing the children for the actions of their parents resulted in no change in behaviour.

Fourthly, more than half of families were not claiming benefits when they had their children, but through redundancy, divorce or the death of a parent they later found that they needed support.

Fifthly, six in ten families affected by this policy are in work and largely doing their best to provide for their families. A typical family helped by lifting the cap will have three children and someone in work.

Child poverty impacts us all. These children are less likely to do well at school and to get five good GCSEs, are far more likely to have poor mental health and to end up not in employment, education or training – bad for them and for the economy. There were nearly a million of these NEETs when the previous government left office.

The life-time cost to these young people of not working is likely to be £1m in lost earnings, with a similar cost to tax-payers in tax revenues lost and in benefits paid. Low aspiration, dependency and poverty then cascades down a further generation.

For taxpayers, lifting children out of poverty and giving them the best possible start in life is not just about fairness. It’s about investing in our future economic prosperity too. We cannot afford to have wasted talents and families trapped in poverty.

That’s why, alongside these changes, the Government this week announced the further roll-out of school breakfast clubs – based on pioneering work first done in Hull 20 years ago.

It seems that Reform just don’t get it – or refuse to. By opposing action to reduce child poverty they would store up bigger and costlier problems for decades ahead.

Reform claims to want to back small businesses and we all take the plight of the hospitality sector and our high streets seriously.

But how does it encourage responsible parenting to make it a tiny bit cheaper to sink another pint at the local pub at the expense of their children going hungry?

Short-sighted, wrong and frankly immoral. So much for promoting family values.

In Hull and East Yorkshire we have a Reform Mayor. Luke Campbell needs to tell us whether he backs Labour’s action to lift children in our area out of poverty – or whether leaving them that way is worth a few more beers?