In his Inside Politics briefing for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush says that, regardless of what Keir Starmer told Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, a Labour government would end up getting rid of the two-child benefits cap. Bush argues:
The Conservatives’ policy — which caps the amount a household can receive in benefits if they have no, or low, earnings — upsets the party’s social liberals, its Christian socialists, its feminists and its pro-welfare tendency . . . Essentially every part of the Labour party hates this policy, which is one reason why almost every major figure in the party is on the record calling the policy “immoral”, “heinous” or “social engineering” or some variation thereof.
The only question will be whether a change to the current cap is enforced on the leadership — perhaps by some equivalent of the bill currently working its way through parliament — or if the policy never gets that far.
You can see at the moment that Keir Starmer is trying to win, essentially, a doctor’s mandate: that was the subtext of his piece for the Observer this weekend. The short version is “the UK is sick, the disease is low growth, give me a mandate to cure the illness”. And you can see, too, how Labour might find its way around this commitment, whether through spinning its changes to universal credit or pointing out the problems that UK benefits create for growth.
Good morning. MPs have got four more days sitting in the Commons before the summer recess starts, but it is not really the moment for Rishi Sunak to start winding down. There are byelections in three Conservative-held seats on Thursday – Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Nigel Adams’ Selby and Ainsty, and David Warburton’s Somerton and Frome – and Tories fear they will lose them all, even though in the latter two the majorities in 2019 were around 20,000. If this does happen, Sunak will be the first PM to lose three byelections in one day since Harold Wilson in 1968 (12 years before Sunak was even born).
We got a preview of one possible Tory line to take in the event of a triple drubbing from the Conservative MP Steve Brine on the Westminster Hour last night. Asked about the possibility of defeat in Uxbridge, he said: “It’s another bit of what I call ‘long Boris’, isn’t it?” Long Boris might also part-explain a defeat in Selby, where the byelection is only happening because Adams, a Johnson loyalist, resigned in a huff when his nomination for a peerage was blocked. But if Sunak does lose in all three seats, most commentators, and Tories, will conclude that this is symptomatic of a wider malaise, and not purely the fault of Johnson.
As recess looms, Keir Starmer has his own problems too. As Pippa Crerar and Patrick Butler report, the Labour leader is facing criticism because yesterday he said he would keep the two-child benefit cap in place.
But a new report out today by academics, who have studied the impact of the policy in detail, says the case for scrapping the two-child cap, and the overall benefit cap, is “overwhelming”. It says both policies are causing “extreme hardship” and failing to incentivise claimaint families to find more work or limit the number of children they have – supposedly the whole point in the first place.
On the two-child cap in particular, the report, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and produced by researchers from the Larger Families project, says:
Many of the families we interviewed did not know that the two-child limit existed until after their child was born and, in some cases, conception was not a choice, but was the result of failed contraception or an abusive relationship. In other cases, the family was not receiving benefits when the affected child was born, and parents only found out about the restriction when their circumstances later changed as a result of relationship breakdown or job loss. Additionally, while there is an exemption in place for children born as a result of non-consensual conception or within the context of domestic abuse, the majority of the participants eligible for this were not receiving it.
As this analysis by Matthew Weaver explains, getting rid of the two-child benefit cap would cost about £1.3bn. This morning Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, defended Starmer’s decision to say Labour would keep it in place, saying the party could only promise things it could afford. She told Sky News:
We’ve got to be clear about what we can fund and that’s why Keir Starmer’s set out the position. Because we’ve got to make sure that any policy that we propose, anything that we might want to change, anything we might not like that the Tories have done, we’ve still got to say how we’d fund it.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rishi Sunak is on a visit to a school.
10am: Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech on national security.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: An education minister is expected to make a statement to MPs on the plans to cap the number of students who can enroll for so-called “low value” courses in England.
After 4.30pm: MPs will debate and vote on the latest Lords amendments to the illegal migration bill.
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