Starmer sets up taskforce for 4m UK children in poverty

The Prime Minister has announced a child poverty taskforce, pledging to leave “no stone unturned” in tackling a growing problem in low-income families.

Expert officials from across government would work together on how best to support more than four-million children now living in poverty, the government said.

The total has risen by 700,000 since 2010, it added.

In the Commons, MPs including Labour’s former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn joined children’s charities and anti-poverty campaigners in calling for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap as the most cost-effective way of reducing child poverty.

The cap was introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 to restrict child welfare payments to a family’s first two children, which the latest government figures show impacts 1.6 million children.

Sir Keir Starmer said the taskforce would “address the root causes of poverty” and be jointly run by the Department for Work and Pensions, responsible for welfare payments, and the Department for Education.

But intervening during Sir Keir’s contribution to the King’s Speech debate in the Commons, Mr Flynn asked why the two-child benefit cap could not be removed immediately.

“Can the prime minister outline how many children will remain in poverty whilst this taskforce undertakes the work which will ultimately lead to the same conclusion which we are proposing – to scrap the two-child benefit cap?”

The SNP-led Scottish government has mitigated the cap through its devolved social security benefit system and has long called for the UK government to axe it altogether.

The prime minister responded that no single policy would be a silver bullet to solve a complex problem, but said the last Labour government had reduced child poverty before and the current one was committed to doing so again.

He said: “The point of the taskforce is to devise a strategy, as we did when last in government, to drive these numbers down.

“It can’t be a single issue – it’s across a number of strands… What matters is the commitment to do it and to drive those numbers down.”

Labour has insisted resources are tight and, ahead of the King’s Speech, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden reiterated the government would not promise what it could not deliver.

But, in a sign of discontent among Labour backbenchers, Mr McDonnell also urged the PM to ditch the two-child cap “within weeks”.

“There’s one simple act that will lift 300,000 children out of poverty this month and it would be the scrapping of the two-child limit,” he said.

The latest Department for Work and Pensions figures showed the two-child cap affected 1.6 million children as of April this year, up from 1.5 million in April 2023, and two-thirds of those families had at least one parent in work.

The House of Commons Library published a report on the policy’s impact in February 2024, concluding “This continuing trend of increasing relative poverty has been driven almost entirely by rising poverty among households with three or more children.”

Ministers responsible for the new child poverty taskforce met children’s charities and campaigners, who have united in calling for the two-child cap to go as soon as possible.

One of those charities was Barnardo’s, whose chief executive Lynn Perry said she understood the government had to take tough financial decisions, but added “families need action urgently, starting with a change to this unfair policy”.

Another was UNICEF, whose director Joanna Rea said the new government “must immediately prioritise support for its youngest and most vulnerable citizens, starting with ending the two-child limit policy and removing the benefit cap”.