Impact of two-child benefit cap evident in food insecurity survey, says charity

More than 6,000 adults were surveyed in the week leading up to the General Election, and the results have been published just days after Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saw off a rebellion which included some of his own MPs in a vote on the controversial policy.

The Food Foundation said its research shows action is “desperately needed” to relieve the pressure on families across the UK who are going hungry.

Its online survey asked 6,177 adults in the UK whether in the previous month they had reduced the size of or skipped meals because they could not afford or get access to food or if they had been hungry but not eaten due to unaffordability or inaccessibility of food.

The polling, carried out by YouGov, found that 14% of households were judged by these measures to have experienced food insecurity.

When it came to households with children, almost a fifth (18%) reported experiencing food insecurity, compared with 12% of households without children.

The charity said the findings also demonstrate the impact of the two-child benefit limit – which restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households.

Some 23% of families with three children and 26% of families with four or more children experienced food insecurity, according to the survey.

This compared with 17% of households with one or two children experiencing food insecurity.

Single-adult households with children were nearly twice as likely to be food insecure as households with multiple adults and a child or children, at 31% compared to 16%.

Campaigners have long been calling for the policy, introduced by the Conservatives in 2015 and which has been in effect since 2017, to be scrapped.

Voices of support for that call have included the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby who has previously described it as “cruel” and a policy which is “neither moral nor necessary”.

This week seven Labour MPs were suspended by the party after a backing an SNP motion to scrap the welfare measure in a vote in Parliament on Tuesday.

While MP Kim Johnson said she had voted with the Government “for unity”, she warned that the strength of feeling within the party was “undeniable”.

“We moved the dial, the campaign will continue,” she said.

Figures published earlier this month by the Department for Work and Pensions showed there were 1.6 million children living in households affected by the policy as of April this year, up from 1.5 million to April 2023.

Labour has cited spending controls as a reason for not being able to immediately ditch the policy, indicating there would be no change to the policy without economic growth.

The Resolution Foundation has said that abolishing the two-child limit would cost the Government somewhere between £2.5 billion and £3.6 billion in 2024/25, but that such costs are “low compared to the harm that the policy causes”.

The Government’s formation of a Child Poverty Taskforce to inform a strategy to tackle the root causes has been welcomed by The Food Foundation, but the charity said “immediate action that is so desperately needed to relieve the families across the UK who are going hungry was sorely lacking in the King’s Speech”.

Shona Goudie, policy and advocacy manager at the foundation, re-stated the call for the cap to be scrapped, but said there are other measures the new Government can take too.

She said: “We urge the Government to set reducing children’s food insecurity as a goal for the child poverty task force and Children’s Wellbeing Bill, and to take critical next steps to achieve this including ensuring the national minimum/living wage and benefit levels cover the cost of basic essentials, including food; extending eligibility for nutritional safety nets including free school meals at lunchtime and Healthy Start; and abolishing the two-child benefit limit.”

Other findings from the research showed that 42% of households getting Universal Credit reported experiencing food insecurity, compared to 11% of those not receiving that benefit, and 13% of workers in some kind of employment reported experiencing food insecurity.

The survey found that non-white ethnic groups (26%) were at higher risk of food insecurity than white ethnic groups (13%), and wide inequalities were evident between households with an adult limited a lot by disability (32%) and households with adults not limited by disability (10%).

Leading public health expert Professor Sir Michael Marmot, who is director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity and professor of epidemiology and public health, said: “There are few things more basic than having enough food to eat. Tragically, in the UK in July 2024, on the eve of the election, 18% of households with children suffered from food insecurity.

“Then there is the quality of food. To follow the Government’s healthy eating advice, households with children in the lowest 20% of household income would have to spend 70% of their income on food.

“These people are not ignorant, lazy, or bad planners. They are poor. The challenge for the new Government is to ensure that every child has the conditions for the best start in life.”

A Government spokesperson said: “No child should be in poverty – that’s why our new cross-government taskforce will develop an ambitious child poverty strategy to tackle the crisis.

“Alongside this urgent work, we will roll out free breakfast clubs in all primary schools to give children the best start in life, while delivering on a plan to grow the economy and make work pay for hardworking families across the country.”