Labour’s push to lift the two-child benefits cap ‘will hand £25,000 windfalls’ to thousands of Britain’s biggest jobless families

Britain’s biggest unemployed families are facing taxpayer-funded windfalls of an average of £25,000 at the end of the decade when Labor scrapped the two-child benefit cap.

Ministers will bring up the law on Tuesday to lift the limit on social assistance payments introduced in 2017.

The government claims this move will lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

But the Conservatives said the plan would add billions of dollars to the aid bill and warned it risked ‘punishing work’.

Official estimates suggest the cost of removing the cap will total £13.6bn over the next five years.

The Conservatives said families currently affected by the cap were in line to receive windfall gains worth an average of £25,000 each over this period.

But the largest families will earn much more. Thousands of families with five children will receive around £10,900 a year, while thousands of families with six children will receive an extra £16,600 a year.

Almost half of the families concerned have no one working.

Tory welfare spokeswoman Helen Whately accuses Labor of ‘rewarding unemployment’

Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately said: ‘Labour is embarking on a £14bn benefits spending spree. Worse still, this shovels almost half the cash into unemployed households, with an average payout of £25,000.

‘While work is punished, unemployment is rewarded. Keir Starmer was happy to take money from pensioners but he doesn’t have the backbone to say no when his own MPs demand out-of-control welfare spending.’

The figures do not include the lifetime cost of growing up in poverty for children, labor sources said Monday. Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden will argue today that growing up poor means children are less likely to do well at school, costing them £1million over their lifetimes.

But research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year suggested the introduction of the cap had ‘no significant impact’ on children’s school readiness at age five.

The benefit cap limits means-tested benefits such as universal credit and child tax credit payments for the first two children, typically costing families £3,455 in lost benefits for each additional child.

Figures produced by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show 470,000 families are currently affected by the policy. Nearly 40 percent live in homes where no one works.

Almost two-thirds (297,000) have three children, while a quarter (117,000) have four children. Another 37,000 affected families have five children, while 18,260 have ‘six or more’ families.

The DWP does not provide a breakdown of the largest families. But different figures released by HM Revenue and Customs show that uncapped child benefit was paid to more than 16,000 families with six children, more than 5,000 families with seven children and even 15 families with 13 or more children.

The total benefits a family receives are covered by a separate ‘benefit cap’ of £25,320 in London and £22,020 outside; However, Labor MPs are also pressing for this limit to be removed.

A Labor Party spokesman defended the decision to lift the cap, saying: ‘The welfare bill has increased by around £60bn under the Conservative Party. They are mistaken in thinking that anyone would take advice from them.

‘Labour is lifting almost half a million children out of poverty. Reform and Conservatives would ruthlessly lead them into this misery.’

Nigel Farage suggested last year that Reform would also remove the two-child limit. But Reformation has now clarified that this will only apply to families where both parents are British-born and work full-time. A Reform source suggested the cap would only be lifted for around 3,700 families.