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The British government’s two-child limit (which cuts off larger families from eligibility for a swath of benefit payments) is not long for this world for many reasons.
One is policy based: the limit is, in effect, a child poverty guarantee that leaves families without access to means-tested support for their third or fourth child. The Child Poverty Action Group has described it as “the biggest driver of child poverty in the UK today”. As a result, everything else the government does to reduce child poverty becomes less effective. It makes a mockery of Labour’s manifesto commitment to lift children out of poverty, along with their vaunted child poverty taskforce.
Another is political: most Labour MPs feel very deeply about the child poverty target and simply will not tolerate a situation in which a Labour government, with a large majority, leaves office with more children in poverty than when it took office.
Both arguments have merit, and there are a number of other good justifications for scrapping the cap. But an important one is being neglected: if you accept that it is in the state’s interests to look after other people’s children at all, then the cut-off point for financial support shouldn’t be under three children. Why not? Because “three children” is the number that many families must produce in order to replace the number of adults in the population. (The UK’s replacement rate is 2.1 births, but you can’t have 0.1 of a person, for obvious reasons.)
While it shouldn’t be the business of states to compel people to have children they don’t want, liberals sometimes have a tendency to conflate “it isn’t right for the state to force you to do something” with “that isn’t the business of the state”.
It absolutely is the business of states to care if people are having enough children to keep their populations at replacement rate. Determining how many children people are having is inevitably part of the calculation states use to manage their care-dependency ratios (the number of working age adults able to pay for or provide care to people, either at the start or end of their lives). It’s part of the constraint on how high or how low rates of tax can be.
There are political and philosophical questions to ask about whether the state should provide support to children at all. I take the view that given we all benefit from more young people of working age knocking about — even those of us who do not, will not or cannot have children — then providing for children should be a shared endeavour that we all have an incentive in working together towards. Reasonable people may disagree.
What forms of encouragement states should try, and which ones work, are debatable. As a liberal, I oppose compulsion and social engineering. The question of “how many humans does it take to make another human” is not a question of politics but of biology. But there’s something intrinsically valuable in the British state recognising that it has a stake in its people having children and that cutting off a family’s access to financial support after they have a second child is inimical to that.
Children shouldn’t be punished for the mistakes their parents make, or if parents lose their job or have their working hours reduced years after the birth of their third child.
But the machine of government works in part in response to the signals that politicians send: a government that regards larger families as a luxury reserved only for the well off is signalling that it places a low value on children. This affects everything from ‘what type of housing should the government encourage?’ (ideally, the sort in which people on median incomes can comfortably raise at least three children) to ‘what obligations do we think people should follow in the workplace?’ (not ones that make it impossible for them to raise three children).
That the UK has, until recently, made it easier for someone to come to the country to work looking after the elderly than to teach the young is an example of that, also.
It’s true to say that many countries — Hungary and France, to name two — have spent a great deal of money encouraging people to have more children, and they have yet to raise their birth rates above replacement rate.
But it is at least positive that they have acknowledged that they do, in fact, have an interest in people having children and that we all have a collective social stake in that. There are some policy questions that have many possible answers. But in this case there is only one possible answer: the preferred number of children that it is good for people in the UK to have is more than two.
