What happened
The two-child limit was introduced by George Osborne in 2015 and took effect in 2017, restricting means-tested benefits to the first two children in most families. Independent analysis — including the government's own — consistently found it was the single largest policy driver of rising UK child poverty, pushing an estimated 1,600 children a month into poverty in its final years.
Labour had been under sustained pressure from its own backbenches, the Child Poverty Action Group, and even seven of its own MPs who were briefly suspended in 2024 for voting to scrap the cap immediately rather than wait for a review. Reeves's November 2025 Budget finally abolished it outright, at an estimated cost of roughly £3 billion a year by the end of the Parliament.
This sits alongside genuine criticism of the same government's record — the Winter Fuel Payment cut and the employer National Insurance rise both landed on households in the same period — but the two-child cap reversal was the single most consequential anti-poverty measure of any UK government since at least the 2010s, and reversed a policy this project has separately documented as a Conservative-era harm.