The Bill to remove the two-child limit in Universal Credit was debated in the House of Lords today (12 March 2026).
The Rt Revd Martyn Snow, Lord Bishop of Leicester, addressed the House with a speech highlighting how the limit deepens both material poverty and the sense of shame experienced by families, reinforcing harmful assumptions about their responsibility and worth. He called for cross‑party collaboration on how to end the policy and address the wider structural and emotional impacts of poverty on people’s lives.
"My Lords, I warmly welcome the introduction of this Bill and the opportunity today to comment on it. I want to congratulate Baroness Teather on her truly excellent maiden speech and I look forward to the maiden contributions of Baroness Antrobus and Lord Walker as well as other noble Lords.
I count myself very fortunate to never have experienced true poverty. But I have spent much of my working life living in communities where poverty was very real – both the absolute poverty of one of the poorest nations in Africa where I worked for several years – and the relative poverty of inner-city Sheffield where I was a Vicar for a decade before becoming Bishop of Leicester.
I have seen first hand therefore that poverty is not just about material resources, but it also has a much wider psycho-social impact. Amartya Sen argued that poverty should be understood not as low income but as capability deprivation: the lack of real freedom or opportunities to live a life one has reason to value. Martha Nussbaum expanded Sen’s framework by proposing a list of central human capabilities — such as life, bodily health, imagination, emotion, affiliation, play, and control over one’s environment - all societies should secure these for every citizen as a matter of justice.
Added to this, is what some have called the poverty-shame nexus - the mutually reinforcing relationship between material hardship and the emotional experience of shame. People in poverty can experience shame through various mechanisms: social stigma (being judged as lazy, undeserving, or morally inferior); institutional interactions, (for example, public services that treat people disrespectfully); or cultural norms that define success and worth in material terms. Research has found that people can internalise stigmatising narratives about poverty and, as a result, have lower self-esteem, lower self-worth, and avoid social interaction with others.
Universal Credit, and its system of sanctions, arguably institutionalises the poverty-shame nexus. While I accept that its introduction in 2013 brought a necessary simplification to welfare payments, the system of sanctions has an implicit moralising message. Claimants must continually prove that they deserve support because they are both “poor enough” and “trying hard enough”. I have myself spoken with people who describe the feeling of being “presumed guilty until you prove you are innocent” as the assumption is that every person looking for help might be “cheating the system”.
It is my belief that the two-child limit to Universal Credit has only added to the poverty-shame nexus. The assumption would appear to be that if you are on UC and have more than two children, you are somehow not being responsible. Yet, I myself have three wonderful children, and I am sure that many other noble Lords also have more than two children. I confess that I did not make a financial calculation ahead of deciding to have a third child, and I imagine many other noble Lords would say the same. Surely, then, we have a duty to lift the sense of shame from others, not reinforce it.
Bishops on this bench have consistently opposed the two-child limit right from its introduction. Indeed, the former Bishop of Durham introduced a Private Members Bill seeking to abolish it in 2022. For us, this is part of a much wider calling to combat poverty in all its forms, addressing both its causes and its wider effects.
I know that noble Lords on all sides of this house share that same concern. Our differences are more to with how this is done rather than whether or not it is done. Yet I dare to hope that once this particular policy is changed, we can find other areas where we can work together to enable those caught in poverty to contribute their gifts and skills to wider society."