Helen Whately: Labour are proud to scrap the two child benefit cap. So are Reform. Both are sending totally the wrong message

Helen Whately MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

The vote on the two-child benefit cap is a statement of values. Should our welfare system back work, or reward worklessness and send the bill to those who get up every morning and graft? Labour has chosen the latter. Reform is following in their wake.

Scrapping the two-child benefit cap will add around £14 billion cumulatively to the UK’s welfare bill over the next five years. Nearly half of that money will go to households where no one is in work – because almost half of the households gaining from scrapping the cap are not in work.

On average those non-working families will get a payout of around £25,000. Some will get much more, because no cap means unlimited welfare.

In the first year alone, around 220,000 workless households will get extra money. By the end of the decade, that rises to around 260,000. That’s over a quarter of a million households getting extra welfare money irrespective of whether anyone in the family works or even attempts to work. It’s just from having more children.

What a message Labour is sending people: don’t worry about getting a job, earning a living or what you can afford; just keep on having kids and the taxpayer will pick up the bill.

What does that tell you about where they stand on British values like personal responsibility, living within your means or fairness?

At the margins, the numbers become starker still. Tens of thousands of households with five children would receive more than £10,000 a year in extra welfare, taking their household incomes to well above what many working families can expect. A household with eight children would receive over £16,000 more a year. These are sums that many working families could dream of, yet they are to be handed out automatically by the state with nothing expected in return.

Incentives in the welfare system are already broken.

Analysis by the Centre for Social Justice shows around 6.2 million full-time workers, roughly one in four, would now be financially better off on benefits than in work once tax is considered. An out-of-work claimant receiving Universal Credit for ill health, alongside average housing support and Personal Independence Payment, can receive around £25,200 a year, equivalent to a £30,100 pre-tax salary.

All of this lands on top of a welfare bill already spiralling out of control. Spending on health and disability benefits alone is forecast to approach £100 billion by the end of the decade. That will make us the biggest spender on welfare in the G7, well above countries known to be high-taxing and high-spending like France and Germany. This generosity comes at a huge price to working people, to taxpayers and to our economy. How on earth Labour will ever hit 3 per cent of GDP on defence – like so many of their promises, it’s just not credible. Working families pay, future taxpayers pay, the country pays.

Labour has already racked up taxes because they can’t control welfare, with the rise in national insurance directly hitting jobs. Unemployment has gone up every month and is now over 5 per cent – the highest level since the pandemic. It’s same old Labour: more taxes, fewer jobs, more people out of work on benefits.

Any sensible government would be focused on making work pay and getting Britain working again but no.

Labour were happy to strip Winter Fuel Payments from millions of pensioners, but when it comes to saying no to their own backbenchers, Keir Starmer suddenly finds his backbone missing.

The Lib Dems, Reform UK, the Greens, Plaid and the SNP all support scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

The Conservatives take a different view. Welfare should be a safety net, not a way of life. It should support people back into work, not write them off. That is why we will vote against scrapping the two-child benefit cap. And that is why we have set out a serious plan to bring the welfare bill under control with £23 billion of savings already identified.

We will restrict welfare to UK citizens, stop giving sickness benefits to people with milder mental health conditions who would be better off in work, stop the abuse of the Motability cars scheme, strengthen job-seeking requirements, and yes, keep the two-child benefit cap in place, because fairness cuts both ways.

The previous Conservative Government had begun that work. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated those reforms would cut long-term benefit dependency by almost half a million people and save billions. Labour scrapped them. Now they want Parliament to wave through even more unfunded spending and call it progress.

This vote draws a clear dividing line. Labour and Reform want to spend more, borrow more, and pretend there is no cost. The Conservatives are prepared to say no.

Because a welfare system that rewards worklessness is not compassionate, not fair, and not sustainable. And the people who pay for it deserve better.