End the two child cap on child benefit - just one way to help reduce child poverty

Thank you, Lord Mayor.  

I rise to second this motion in my name and that of Cllr Morriam Jan.   

I am happy to support this motion on such an important issue, not least because these measures are all achievable, and will make positive changes that will help our city’s children.  

Of course, I would like the council to go much further, but we have deliberately written this motion in a way that it can be implemented.   

I’d like to support the ideas raised by Cllr Jan on finding a Child Poverty commissioner and making progress where we can for children in temporary accommodation. I hope that my fellow colleagues in this chamber will add extra things that we can do, despite current financial challenges.   

One of the things we can do, is to press for Government to do more. Levelling up has clearly failed, and poverty in Birmingham gets worse as families get larger. The swiftest and most efficient way to lift families out of poverty is to end the two-child cap on child benefit. 23.4% of families have more than 2 children in Birmingham versus the national average of 15%. 46% of Birmingham’s children are living in relative poverty. That is over double the national average.   

The decision to cap the benefit has had a disproportionate impact on Birmingham. We should and we could campaign for a reversal of this bad decision.  

We can also do a lot to make our services and information easier to access. People with fewer resources tend to use a mobile phone to access information, they are less likely to have laptops, so all web services should be easily accessible and usable from a mobile.   

I tried a few search terms to find information relevant to Birmingham. The pages I clicked on our website were very wordy, which isn’t ideal for reading on a phone especially by people whose first language isn’t English. Other councils have better web pages with images, clear buttons and colours to differentiate.   

Focusing on a customer centred improvement to pages that relate to help with managing finances, the care leaver offer, youth facilities and local support services, would help parents and children to find the information they need.   

School meals offer children in poverty the chance to get a healthy, balanced meal each day. All infants get this, which means that there is no stigma attached to free school meals. It helps with learning and gives parents reassurance that their children are getting well fed.  

Since Brexit we have seen food prices rocket. Healthy, fresh food is always more expensive. There are teachers working in our schools who are buying and bringing in fresh food for hungry children.  That is not right. 

One of the saddest things about poverty is that many children don’t even have a table at home. Families in overcrowded conditions or in temporary accommodation don’t often even have a place to cook hot meals. For too many children, school is the only place where a child can get to eat at a table with cutlery. Not only is this a fundamental life skill, but the table is the place where families come together to have meaningful conversations.  

How many of us have fond memories of family mealtimes from our childhood years?   

The qualifying criteria for free school meals is that families must be in receipt of at least one benefit on a list. Those in child tax credit cannot exceed an income of £16,190. I struggle to think how any family in a low income copes with clothing, feeding, heating and keeping a roof over the family’s head.   

We know that the threshold is far too low. Mayor Richard Parker made an election pledge to lobby for free school meals for the 66,000 children in poverty across the West Midlands. It’s time for him to deliver on that promise.   

When I first came to Birmingham as a teenager, I worked in a children’s home.  Through my subsequent careers in the police and a homeless charity I have seen many times over the consequences of not addressing child poverty. As a Councillor I find it heart-breaking that 50 years on I am trying to help struggling families living in sub-standard conditions and the cycle has not been broken at all.  

This motion is an attempt to make a change. I hope you will support us.  

Thank you Lord Mayor.