In the hours after Keir Starmer’s partial U-turn on the winter fuel allowance, there was much speculation about whether it would lead to other benefit cuts being reversed. As Labour announced it would change tack on support for pensioners, would the government still vote to cut disabled people’s personal independence payments next month? If the economy is improving and Starmer wants to “make sure people feel those improvements”, would the upcoming child poverty plan see the two-child benefit limit finally abolished?
Perhaps. As was leaked quietly to the media last Friday, it appears the government isn’t bumping up its flagship child poverty strategy – it’s delaying it. After 14 years of Conservative austerity and rising prices, more than one in three children now live in poverty in the UK – the highest level this century. Ministers are due to announce a package of up to £750m to tackle this crisis in June, but any new measures have reportedly been pushed back until at least the autumn. As one source said of the reluctance of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney to scrap the two-child limit: “He doesn’t think they would be getting enough political capital with voters as a result of the money they would have to put in.”
Within a day, the Observer reported Starmer has privately told the cabinet that he does intend to end the two-child limit. The delay to the child poverty strategy, sources say, will allow the changes to be “fully costed.”
It is not that such messy flip-flopping is surprising, of course, but that – coming only days after the winter fuel climbdown – any excuses for inaction are increasingly hard to swallow.
When Starmer rowed back on the winter fuel allowance, saying he would look again at making more pensioners eligible, he in effect pulled the curtain back in Oz. The illusion that this Labour government (and many others) rely on – that there is no money, that inequality is inevitable, that even the worst suffering cannot be eased – disappeared in a puff of smoke. If there is cash to keep pensioners warm in winter, why aren’t there ways to raise funds to do the same for children? If the winter fuel U-turn came after it was cited as a key cause of the local election defeats, are decisions actually based on the economy or electioneering?
The facade first slipped a few days earlier, when it emerged that Angela Rayner urged Rachel Reeves to consider wealth taxes before the spring statement, in a document pointedly entitled “alternative proposals for raising revenue”. This was framed by many in terms of internal tension within Labour – the chancellor on the right of the party in favour of spending cuts to the social safety net v the leftwing deputy prime minister against – but it was really about saying the quiet part out loud. Poverty is a political choice after all.
If the “will he, won’t he” surrounding the two-child limit seems drawn out – and it really does – consider it in the context of Starmer’s premiership. Less than a year in office, his inner team appears almost solely focused on re-election in lieu of any vision for the country, as if the point of power is simply to keep it rather than do something with it. The result is an administration lurching from one idea to the next, trying out benefit cuts, migrant bashing, then benefit cut U-turns in the hope that something, anything, sticks.
Panicked turnarounds are in many ways the natural end point of governance by spreadsheet, in which a hungry child is not someone’s daughter who needs a hot meal but a statistic on a whiteboard with the heading “GE 2029”.
Reports that the child poverty taskforce has recommended bringing back Sure Start but the government is unsure how to fund it shows how this mindset puts a stranglehold on even the most obviously good ideas. That research consistently shows the early years centres – a proven success that the coalition largely eradicated – actually saved money last time around shows the short-termism and intellectual cowardice behind the “we can’t afford it” mantra.
Even the winter fuel change was largely subservience to the status quo. It has long been seen as legitimate in this country for the state to starve a child or degrade a disabled person, but a cardinal sin to take a penny from a pensioner. The same newspapers that had a hernia over the winter fuel allowance will next month cheer on taking lifeline benefits from disabled people – a move that will notably push another 50,000 children into poverty, along with their disabled and sick parents.
This is not to say that many older people do not need more support – the UK state pension is lower than in most other advanced economies relative to average earnings – but that there is an entire political and media ecosystem that decides which groups “deserve” help and which ones don’t. In many ways, Starmer’s biggest mistake was briefly forgetting the rules.
There are moments when I wonder how exactly a Labour landslide has come to this. How a government that was elected with gutter-low expectations less than a year ago has, with such efficiency, failed to meet even them. I remember the headlines in recent years about children sleeping on their bedroom floor because they don’t have a bed, or pretending to eat out of an empty lunchbox as they’re ashamed their parents can’t afford a sandwich, and I wonder how this column even needs to be written. A Labour government is in power and we are still debating whether the state should help children who are cold, hungry and dirty.
In the meantime, about 100 children are being pulled below the breadline every day by the two-child limit alone. If the government delays the child poverty strategy for six months, an estimated 20,000 more infants will be going to bed with hunger pains by Christmas. So, we wait, as we are so used to, and hope at some point there is enough “political capital” for Starmer to feed them.
