Political honeymoons these days often seem to be shorter in duration than most actual honeymoons. Keir Starmer’s arguably came to an end less than three weeks after Labour’s historic victory, when, on July 23 seven Labour MPs voted in support of an SNP motion calling for the two-child benefit cap to be scrapped, leading to those MPs being suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party for six months.

The two-child benefit cap, announced by the Conservative government in 2015 and implemented from 2017, restricts universal credit and child tax credit payments to parents’ first two children. The Conservatives argued that it made the system fairer, claiming it ensured households in receipt of benefits faced the same financial choices around having children as other households. However, the policy was immediately and vociferously condemned by anti-poverty campaigners, who argued it would push many more families into poverty. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that, when fully rolled out, an additional 590,000 children across the UK will fall into relative poverty. Children’s charities have called it a “tax on siblings” and argued that scrapping it is necessary to even begin to tackle child poverty effectively.

Until relatively recently, the Labour Party appeared to share this view; it campaigned on overturning the cap in the 2019 General Election. However, in mid-2023, Labour shifted position, arguing that the cap was too expensive to reverse in the short term. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has repeatedly emphasised her commitment to avoiding "unfunded spending promises’" and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that removing the two-child cap would eventually cost the Government £3.4 billion a year.

Fast forward to July 2024, and while the new Labour Government was easily able to defeat the SNP’s motion, the vote underlined tensions within the Labour Party over the cap: not least between UK and Scottish Labour, who had restated their opposition to the cap when the revised UK position was announced in mid-2023. The fact that, a year later, 36 of Labour’s 37 Scottish MPs voted against scrapping the cap provided a clear target for the SNP, who claimed “Scottish Labour had insulted their voters in Scotland by u-turning” on the issue.

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Given this context, while the focus of media and public attention is understandably currently elsewhere in the wake of recent riots across parts of England and Northern Ireland, the question of when, or whether, Labour will scrap the cap seems unlikely to disappear from the political agenda for long.

But where does the public sit on this policy? Britain-wide polling conducted by Ipsos in the wake of the July 2024 vote indicates that public opinion is also divided.

Overall, 40% said the policy should remain as it currently is, with benefits only paid for a maximum of two children, while an additional 12% favoured either a one-child cap or no additional benefits being paid for children at all. However, 38% felt that the two-child cap was too low: 15% thought there should be no cap at all, while 23% said the cap should be set higher than two children. So while, on balance, around half the British public currently appear supportive of retaining a cap, four in 10 want to see the cap relaxed or removed.

Much is often made of claims that voters in Scotland are more left-wing than their counterparts in England. However, in practice polling often finds that any such differences that do exist are fairly small. Ipsos Scotland polling from July 2023, when Labour shifted its position, echoes such findings: 43% of Scots favoured either no cap or setting the cap higher than two children, only a little higher than the 39% of all Britons who took the same position at that point in time. Moreover, more Scots (49%) either supported the current cap (34%) or wanted an even stricter limit (15%). So it is not obvious that the Scottish public is necessarily any more united on this topic than the British public as a whole.

Chancellor Rachel ReevesChancellor Rachel Reeves (Image: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire)

However, if the public is divided on the two-child cap, this does not imply that they think there are no issues with how the benefits system supports children in the UK: 54% of Britons polled in 2024 said the benefits system did a poor job of tackling child poverty, with just 20% saying it did well on this front. The same proportion (54%) say the benefit system does poorly in delivering value for money to taxpayers.

Keir Starmer has announced a taskforce to begin work on a new UK Child Poverty Strategy. He will need bold plans to shift the dial, both on the level of child poverty and on public confidence in the benefits system. Whatever position this taskforce takes on the two-child cap, navigating political and public divisions on the policy may prove an ongoing challenge for the new UK government.

Rachel Ormston is a Research Director at Ipsos in Scotland