Meeting of the Parliament 04 October 2023
There is the irony—I have to mitigate not only what the Tories are doing, but the Labour Party, too. What a sad indictment of where Scottish Labour is now. I will come on to the mitigation method in due course.
It seems that, bereft of any social justice policies, the Labour Party has simply given up on tackling poverty. The Scottish Government has been consistent in its opposition to the two-child limit since its inception in 2017, and it has repeatedly called on the UK Government to abolish it.
The policy purposely targets vulnerable children, and the Department for Work and Pensions’s own analysis estimates that it is currently impacting around 1.5 million children in the UK. The House of Commons library tells us that it has affected 80,000 children in Scotland during the past 12 months alone and states that it has cost Scottish families in the region of £341 million in benefits since its inception. Child Poverty Action Group analysis found that removing the two-child limit would pull 250,000 children across the UK out of poverty and a further 850,000 children would be in less deep poverty.
It is clear that the policy severely impacts children, and it is punishing children because their parents are on low incomes. It cannot be right to limit the financial support that is available to children, simply because they have two or more siblings.
There are calls from other parties for the Scottish Government to mitigate the two-child limit. However, we do not have the powers to remove the policy at source. While universal credit and child tax credits remain reserved to Westminster, this is the situation that we are in. Even if financial mitigation were possible, the two-child limit and associated rape clause would still be applied by the UK Government.
However, the Scottish Government should not have to spend its fixed budget on rectifying the UK Government’s failures. We are already spending £130 million per year to directly mitigate some of the UK Government’s benefit cuts such as the bedroom tax and the benefit cap. Over the past six years, we have invested £733 million in directly mitigating UK Government policies, money that could have been spent on services such as health, education and transport, on further ambitious anti-poverty measures or on paying for 2,000 band 5 nurses each year. That is the price of staying in the union.