Yvette Cooper has defended Labour’s plan to keep the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, which has been blamed for pushing families into poverty.
The shadow home secretary insisted Labour must be “clear about what we can fund” as she emphasised the party’s focus on economic responsibility.
It comes after Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday confirmed he would retain the two-child limit despite growing calls from poverty campaigners for the cap to be abandoned.
Asked about this on Monday, Ms Cooper told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “What Labour’s been clear about is we have to tackle the cost-of-living crisis and we also will always make sure that the proposals we put forward are fully costed and funded so that we can actually deliver them, and I think that’s what people want to see.”
She pointed to measures Labour will fund to help tackle child poverty, including free breakfast clubs, helping people with their mortgages and reforming Universal Credit.
Sticking to the message that financial prudence is paramount risks angering the Labour left, and even some among the Labour leader’s top team have previously expressed views that appear to diverge from the current party line.
Shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth recently described the two-child benefit cap as “heinous” and “absolutely keeping children in poverty”.
Ms Cooper told Sky News: “We opposed it when it first came in. And we have pointed out a whole series of different things that the Conservatives have done that are damaging, but we’ve also been really clear that anything that we say has got to be funded.”
The last Labour government went into the 1997 election “being really clear about only saying the things that we could fund, but we got the economy growing, we built our public services and we did a whole series of things that lifted families out of poverty,” she said.
The long-serving Labour MP said there had been a 40% increase in child poverty under the Tories and insisted a Labour government would address this.
The cap was introduced in 2013, under the then-Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government which hailed it as a way of “restoring fairness to the welfare state”.
It sees the amount of benefits a household receives reduced to ensure claimants do not receive more than the cap limit.
The Child Poverty Action Group last week called for the “deeply harmful” measure to be scrapped, saying that some of the worst-affected families have less than £50 to live on each week after paying their rent.
