How can Labour support this cruelty to children?

Felicity Dowling asks how the Labour Party can support the benefit cap cut when it will put children on the breadline.

The benefit cap was bad enough. Now the government plans to reduce this cap further, limiting the total a family of any size can receive to £23,000. A leaked report says this could push another 40,000 children a year into poverty.

What is the Labour Party’s response? Labour has come out in support of the reduction in the benefit cap.

Why? I ask: why? As we organise to defend what we have, why would Labour do this?

The benefit cap limits the amount claimants can receive even what that amount is less than what the government’s own figures say they need just to live.

Hit by the cap

This is a policy that hits the young hardest. The Children’s Society says 140,000 children are currently hit by the cap (compared to 60,000 adults). Matthew Reed from the charity says it will be responsible for “putting more children on the breadline”.

Of the 55,000 families affected by the benefit cap so far, a third had five or more children. The Conservatives say they support families but then penalise large ones.

So why is this Labour’s policy? Don’t children matter? Labour’s interim leader Harriet Harman put various caveats on her support – that it should not result in more homelessness, or more children being hurt. But that is the only effect that the policy will have!

As three judges pointed out in a dissenting judgement on the legality of the benefit cap, “Claimants affected by the cap will, by definition, not receive the sums of money which the state deems necessary for them adequately to house, feed, clothe and warm themselves and their children.”

That is what the Labour Party is supporting.