A cabinet minister has said for the first time that the government will consider removing the two-child benefit cap as part of its review into child poverty, as support among rebel Labour MPs grows for an amendment to abolish it.
Keir Starmer will face the first key test of his authority in the coming days over Labour’s decision not to scrap the cap immediately.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, suggested on Monday that the potential to scrap the limit was on the table as part of the remit of the child poverty taskforce, which will investigate a number of measures over the coming months. She cautioned, however, that it was among the most expensive of the measures under consideration.
Labour, Scottish Nationalist, Liberal Democrat and some Conservative MPs are expected to criticise the government on the topic during the king’s speech debate over the next two days, with a possible vote if the speaker selects an amendment on Tuesday.
Phillipson told Sky News the government would consider removing the two-child benefit cap among a range of potential measures to reduce child poverty.
“Unfortunately it’s also a very expensive measure, but we will need to consider it as one of a number of levers in terms of how we make sure we lift children out of poverty,” she said.
“Housing is a big factor … The fact that for lots of families work doesn’t pay in the way that it should, and that increasingly what we see is that children are growing up in poverty where there is at least one person in that household in work.
“We will look at every measure in terms of how we can address this terrible blight that scars the life chances of too many children.”
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told the BBC on Sunday that she could not pledge to scrap the cap without saying where the £3bn annual cost was going to come from.
“If we’re not able to say where the money is going to come from, we can’t promise to do it. That’s true when it comes to the two-child limit and anything else,” she said.
More than a dozen backbenchers are understood to support an amendment to the king’s speech, and the SNP has also tabled an amendment to scrap the cap, which with a few exceptions prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child.
The MP for Canterbury, Labour’s Rosie Duffield wrote in The Sunday Times that the cap, which the then-chancellor George Osborne introduced in 2017, was “sinister and overtly sexist” and had been her main motivation in standing for parliament.
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She also criticised the so-called “rape clause”, which provides an exception for children conceived as a result of an attack. “The authors of this policy are telling women: disclose to a series of total strangers that your third or any subsequent children are the result of rape and we will pay you after all,” she said.
The two-child benefit cap affects 1.6 million children, according to the latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions.
Many of the charities and organisations consulted by the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, on the taskforce last week have called for the cap to be abolished. Save the Children said that “scrapping the two-child limit the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty” and the TUC said “punitive policies like the two-child limit have caused widespread misery”.
The Resolution Foundation has said the “costs are low compared to the harm that the policy causes, and scrapping the two-child limit would be one of the most efficient ways to drive down child poverty rates”.