DERRY JOURNAL Editorial: The two-child limit must be abolished now

​Over 2,900 children (11%) in 800 homes in Derry are affected by the two-child cap on Universal Credit and Tax Credits that prevents parents with a third child born on or after April 2017 from claiming extra support.

Derry already suffers one of the highest child poverty rates in Ireland and the UK. The End Child Poverty Coalition, NI Anti Poverty Network and Save the Children are again calling for the cap to be abolished. They are right.

It takes the bread out of the mouths of children and exacerbates a cost-of-living crisis for many citizens as Christmas and the coldest months of winter approach.

The cap was announced in 2015 by the George Osborne as he and his government careened ahead on their mission to convert a ‘high welfare, high tax economy, to a lower welfare, lower tax society’.

Studies have shown it has only contributed to increases in child poverty. This will only grow as more children are born after the 2017 cut-off date.

In 2021 the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics found that after two decades of a downward trend child poverty in the UK started rising again from 2012/13.

LSE said changes in the generosity of social security support were ‘a central explanation for the substantial fall in child poverty in larger families in the years to 2012/13...and in the sharp rise in poverty since then’. The cap should be reversed at the earliest opportunity.

Poorer Derry men dying 5 years younger with far higher rates of alcohol admissions and drugs deaths