Labour MPs have boasted about axing the two-child benefit cap – despite growing alarm at the size of Britain’s spiralling welfare bill.
Sir Keir Starmer last night used his huge majority in the House of Commons to move a step closer to scrapping the policy.
MPs voted 458 to 104, majority 354, to ensure the Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill passed at second reading.
It will be further scrutinised by MPs and peers before it can become law, but the Government has said it wants to ditch the two-child limit from April.
The policy, introduced by the previous Tory administration, currently prevents parents from claiming Universal Credit or child tax credit for a third or additional child born after April 2017.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has estimated scrapping the cap will cost taxpayers £3billion a year by 2029/30.
An analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found 400,000 fewer children will be living in poverty this April compared with 12 months earlier as a result removing the limit.
Both the Conservatives and the majority of Reform UK voted against removing the two-child benefit cap on Tuesday night.
But two Reform MPs were revealed to have ‘accidentally’ sided with the Government.
According to Sky News, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – two former Tory ministers who defected to Nigel Farage’s party last month – ‘got trapped as the doors were locked’ after mistakenly entering the aye lobby.
They were later recorded as voting with the Government, according to Parliament’s voting data.
If the Bill passes into law, it would mean families can receive the child element of Universal Credit for all children, regardless of family size.
Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said the two-child benefit cap had seen children used as pawns for almost a decade.
He told MPs: ‘It was never really about welfare reform, nor was it even about saving money.
‘No, this was always first and foremost a political exercise, an attempt to set a trap for opponents, with children used as the pawns in the exercise.
‘This was all about the politics of dividing lines, dividing lines between so-called shirkers and strivers, between the old distinction of the deserving and undeserving poor.’
The Tories have vowed to re-instate the policy if they come back into power.
Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately told the Commons many families are ‘doing the maths’ of whether they should have another child.
She said: ‘Why should people on benefits get to avoid the hard choices faced by everyone else?’
Echoing this, her party colleague, Conservative former deputy prime minister Sir Oliver Dowden, defended the policy as having had a ‘principle’ behind it ‘which is, will people take responsibility for their own actions?’
He added: ‘Because there are thousands, millions of people who choose not to have more children because they want to take responsibility for their lives and they don’t want the state to take responsibility.
‘And yet now with this change, the Government is saying to those people, not only will the state take responsibility, you as the individual will have to pay for it through higher taxes.’
Mr Farage previously said Reform would support abolishing the two-child cap, but later clarified that would only be for families where both parents were British and working full-time.
Last month, he said his party’s MPs would vote against getting rid of the limit.
