3 hours ago
9
We write as two paediatricians deeply alarmed by the scale of child poverty in the UK. It is unconscionable that any child should go to bed hungry – least of all in the world’s fifth largest economy.
As the children’s commissioner wrote in her July 2025 report, “This report should not have to exist.” Nor, indeed, should this letter, nor Stephen Cottrell’s excoriating piece (I have seen the extent of child poverty in the UK and I say this: the two-child benefit cap must go, 1 September), nor Gordon Brown’s powerful warning (Nothing prepared me for the child poverty I see in Britain. November’s budget can and must halt its inexorable rise, 15 September). And yet here we are – still needing to remind our leaders that poverty blights childhood, shortens lives, and scars futures.
In our clinics we see the consequences daily: babies failing to thrive because their parents cannot afford formula; school children too hungry to learn; teenagers weighed down by the stress of family poverty. These are preventable harms.
The two-child benefit cap is a policy choice that keeps hundreds of thousands of children in poverty. It must go. The evidence is overwhelming – from the Child Poverty Action Group to the British Medical Journal – that lifting the cap would be the single most effective step to reduce child poverty.
We urge the government to act: introduce a modest tax on wealth, or other progressive measures, to fund this change. The archbishop of York has called for it. Gordon Brown has pleaded for it. We, as paediatricians, add our voices. Our children cannot wait.
Guddi Singh and Geoff Debelle
London
Yes, Bridget Phillipson, you are quite right to say that the two-child benefit limit is spiteful (Scrapping of two-child benefit cap closer as Bridget Phillipson attacks ‘spiteful’ policy, 19 September). It was when the previous government implemented it. And it still was when you, Bridget, voted to continue with it.
None of us need to be told that children are not responsible for how many siblings they have, how much money their parents earn, or how any government decides to treat them. I am a Labour supporter and voter all my adult life, and a member for some years, and this is the most cynical government I can remember. At least the government who passed it had a (from their point of view) commonsense reason for doing so. And now, when the prime minister and his senior advisers can see their support slipping across the country, this policy suddenly has to go?
I am longing for the opportunity to vote in a different prime minister and deputy prime minister. Maybe then we will be able to have a real Labour government.
Joan Friend
Oldham, Greater Manchester
The neighbour, who, seeing Bridget Phillipson as a child playing outside in a jumper in the cold, “put money through the door in an envelope” to pay for a coat actually did it there and then.
He didn’t, like Phillipson, wait over a year, then wake up one morning to suddenly realise, a bolt from the blue, that the two-child benefit cap policy was “spiteful” and had “punished and pushed children into hardship”. Phillipson should be thankful that her childhood neighbour was a Keynesian. So unlike Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Phillipson herself, he knew that he could afford what he could do.
David Murray
Wallington, London
