Despite having a £30 billion fiscal hole to fill Rachel Reeves might be about to splash the cash. If reports are to be believed, in the coming weeks the lifting of the two-child benefit cap will be announced. The cost is £3bn every year.

The cap was introduced under George Osborne to stop families claiming the child element of UC for three or more children. A committee of ministers and officials are due to make a series of recommendations to tackle child poverty before the November Budget, and it’s now widely expected that this will include scrapping the cap.

But will lifting it do anything to improve child poverty? There is some evidence to suggest it won’t. The problem is the government and charities’ reliance on the ‘relative poverty’ metric, which gives an incomplete picture of pover

See Full Page