In Ayrshire Live on 24th July 2024:

New Labour MPs vote to keep two-child benefit cap despite branding it ‘cruel’ previously During the election campaign Kilmarnock and Loudoun’s new MP previously called the two-child benefit cap “cruel”. All four of Ayrshire’s new Labour MPs have voted with the UK Government to keep the two-child benefit cap.

Central Ayrshire MP Alan Gemmell, Kilmarnock and Loudoun MP Lillian Jones, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock MP Elaine Stewart and North Ayrshire and Arran MP Irene Campbell all backed Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/ayrshire/new-labour-mps-vote-keep-33314784

Today in the Guardian:

Labour restores whip to three more MPs who opposed two-child benefit cap – Labour has restored the whip to a further three MPs who voted against the two-child benefit cap, the Guardian understands.

Ian Byrne, Imran Hussain and Richard Burgon were among seven parliamentarians who were suspended in July for supporting an amendment to the king’s speech, tabled by the SNP.

They had been sitting as independents in the Commons alongside Apsana Begum, John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana. They all lost the party whip for six months last summer, after which their suspensions were due to be reviewed.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/05/labour-restores-whip-to-three-more-mps-who-opposed-two-child-benefit-cap

All 37 Scottish Labour MPs, including these four from some of the poorest constituencies in the country, voted to keep the two-child benefit cap proven by researchers at the London School of Economics, a year before their election, to have already done this to thousands of children in their constituencies:

Introduced in 2017, the UK government’s two-child benefit cap was supposed to incentivise parents into work. Instead, it has plunged a rising number of children into poverty, research by Kitty Stewart reveals, harming not just their experiences of childhood today, but their long-term opportunities and life chances.

This is a highly unusual policy in international comparative terms. In Europe only three other countries place such a limit on support – Spain, Romania and Cyprus – and in each of these the limit is three or four children, not two. The vast majority of European countries either pay benefits equally for all children or are more generous per child as family size increases.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/politics/two-child-benefit-cap-poverty

How many people are impacted by the two-child limit?

Around 440,000 families across the UK are impacted by the two-child benefit cap, official figures from the DWP show. It means that 1.6 million children are affected by the two-child limit compared with families whose kids were born sooner.

https://www.bigissue.org.uk/news/social-justice/what-is-two-child-benefit-cap-families/#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20are%20impacted%20by%20the%20two-child,compared%20with%20families%20whose%20kids%20were%20born%20sooner.

So roughly 160 000 children in Scotland kept in poverty by these 37 Labour MPs and thousands in these four Ayrshire constituencies where, locally, Labour had a long and proud tradition of fighting poverty.