UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has taken decisive action in getting rid of the two-child limit – a policy that has held a totemic place in the UK for more than a decade. Since 2017, this policy has limited the means-tested support that families can receive from the state to the first two children in a household, with some specific exceptions.

But now, the two-child limit is to be scrapped from April 2026. My own research has shown how the limit often leaves families struggling to meet essential costs, and forced to forgo everyday activities. This could even be things like reading children a bedtime story as parents instead hunt round supermarkets for discounted food.

Both the two-child limit and the benefit cap (a ceiling on the support that a household where no one works 16 hours a week can receive, and which remains in place) were launched at the height of the UK’s austerity years.

At the time, the public were being served sensationalised portrayals of people receiving social security support. Politicians were happy to denigrate social security recipients too.

Amid claims of seeking to create more fairness in the tax and social security systems, politicians returned to binary divisions between “strivers” and “shirkers”. These representations bore little relationship to reality but they appeared to be electorally popular. And they provided the rationale to take a wrecking ball to what remained of the social security “safety net”.

Announcing the two-child limit in an emergency budget in 2015, the then chancellor, George Osborne, spoke of the need to support families while being fair to “working” people. This ignored the reality that millions of families require social security to top up the incomes they receive from paid employment.

The narrative does not align with the realities of in-work social security recipients – 2.7 million UK workers receive universal credit, a third of total recipients. And 59% of those affected by the two-child limit live in working households.

Neither is it possible to divide the UK into those who do and do not pay taxes. Everyone pays them, both through income taxation and taxes on goods and services. Some taxes, such as VAT, even leave those with the least handing over a much greater share of their income every time they pay for an item.

Hard realities

In introducing both the benefit cap and then the two-child limit, the Conservatives were seeking to change the behaviour of the people affected by these policies. In the case of the two-child limit, there was the suggestion that claimants would think differently about how many children they could afford to have, or change their employment patterns.

And in the case of the benefit cap, they hoped people would move into work. Or, where high rents were the issue, that people would move into cheaper properties.

But all of this was a mirage, and research I have undertaken with colleagues has shown how both of these policies fail. This failure is complete even in the terms set out by those who introduced them.

That is, with the two-child limit, there has been almost no noticeable impact on fertility, nor have there been changes to employment.

None of this is surprising because no one knows what their future holds. As Reeves argued in the budget, people lose their jobs, get sick or die prematurely. That’s why the social security system should be there to support people, providing help when times are hard.

The same applies with the benefit cap. The cheaper homes that the Conservatives hoped families would move into simply do not exist in many parts of the UK. Families living under the cap often face real and serious barriers to employment such as a lack of good childcare and poor transport links. These are not addressed by simply limiting financial support.

Instead, these policies create and deepen poverty and hardship. Both have directly resulted in rapid rises in poverty risks, especially for vulnerable groups like larger families, single parents and people with disabilities.

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Given all of this evidence, it is surprising that the two-child limit was not scrapped earlier. Perhaps it has endured in part because of the pervasiveness of anti-welfare rhetoric – the prevalence of the language of “scroungers” and “skivers” that sociologists describe as constituting an “anti-welfare commonsense”.

While Reeves’ decision to axe the two-child limit prompted some predictably negative headlines, the vast majority of the UK public (83% according to recent polling) actually wants to see action on child poverty.

When kids can have the very best childhood possible it is good for all of us. Children free of poverty now will become adults who are more able to flourish and make a real and lasting contribution as workers, parents or carers in future.

Reeves set this out in her budget speech, and it would be great to hear more of these arguments from her and others in Labour in the weeks and months ahead. Perhaps this could even begin a reset of the UK’s relationship with social security after those long years of austerity.