We create as 2 paediatricians deeply startled by the scale of kid hardship in the UK. It is outrageous that any type of child needs to go to sleep hungry– the very least of all in the world’s 5th largest economy.
As the kids’s commissioner wrote in her July 2025 record, “This record should not need to exist.” Neither, certainly, needs to this letter, neither Stephen Cottrell’s excoriating piece ( I have seen the level of kid poverty in the UK and I claim this: the two-child advantage cap must go, 1 September , nor Gordon Brown’s powerful warning ( Nothing prepared me for the youngster destitution I see in Britain. November’s spending plan can and have to stop its inexorable increase, 15 September And yet right here we are– still needing to remind our leaders that destitution blights childhood, shortens lives, and marks futures.
In our centers we see the repercussions daily: infants stopping working to grow since their moms and dads can not manage formula; school youngsters also hungry to find out; young adults bore down by the stress and anxiety of family hardship. These are avoidable injuries.
The two-child benefit cap is a policy selection that keeps hundreds of hundreds of kids in hardship. It should go. The proof is overwhelming– from the Kid Poverty Activity Team to the British Medical Journal — that lifting the cap would certainly be the single most effective step to minimize youngster poverty.
We prompt the federal government to act: present a small tax obligation on wide range, or various other dynamic measures, to fund this change. The archbishop of York has actually required it. Gordon Brown has advocated it. We, as paediatricians, include our voices. Our children can not wait.
Guddi Singh and Geoff Debelle
London
Yes, Bridget Phillipson, you are fairly appropriate to claim that the two-child benefit restriction is spiteful ( Scrapping of two-child benefit cap better as Bridget Phillipson attacks ‘spiteful’ policy, 19 September It was when the previous government implemented it. And it still was when you, Bridget, elected to proceed with it
None of us need to be told that youngsters are not responsible for the amount of siblings they have, just how much cash their parents make, or how any kind of government decides to treat them. I am a Work supporter and citizen all my adult life, and a participant for some years, and this is one of the most cynical federal government I can bear in mind. A minimum of the federal government that passed it had a (from their viewpoint) realistic factor for doing so. And now, when the prime minister and his senior advisers can see their support slipping throughout the nation, this plan suddenly has to go?
I am wishing for the chance to vote in a various prime minister and deputy head of state. Maybe after that we will certainly be able to have a real Labour federal government.
Joan Buddy
Oldham, Greater Manchester
The neighbor, who, seeing Bridget Phillipson as a kid having fun outside in a jumper in the chilly, “placed cash via the door in an envelope” to spend for a layer actually did it there and then.
He didn’t, like Phillipson, delay over a year, then awaken one morning to all of a sudden become aware, a bolt from the blue, that the two-child advantage cap policy was “spiteful” and had actually “punished and pressed children into hardship”. Phillipson must be glad that her childhood years neighbor was a Keynesian. So unlike Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Phillipson herself, he understood that he might afford what he might do.
David Murray
Wallington, London