Prime Minister faces more pressure over 'heinous' benefit two-child benefit cap

The Prime Minister is facing increasing pressure over what critics have called a 'sexist' and 'heinous' cap to child benefits.

Writing in The Times, Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield said the two-child benefit cap, introduced by then-chancellor George Osborne in 2015, was “sinister and overtly sexist” and had been the main reason driving her to stand for Parliament.

She said: “The obvious target is the caricature of the ‘feckless’, ‘irresponsible’ people who drop children every few minutes without being able to pay for them, but the subtext is altogether more sinister: it is an attack on women’s right to choose how many children they have.”

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Ms Duffield criticised the so-called “rape clause” which provides an exception for children conceived through an attack, saying: “The authors of this policy are telling women: disclose to a series of total strangers that your third or any subsequent children are the result of rape and we will pay you after all.”

Likening the policy to the dystopian society in Margaret Attwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are deprived of their rights, Ms Duffield said women were being “subjugated according to their social class”.

The new Government has already come under pressure to abolish the cap from campaigners, opposition parties and some of its own backbenchers, with some rebel Labour MPs set to move an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the policy to be scrapped.

The Government has announced a taskforce to develop a child poverty strategy, led by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, although many of the charities consulted by Ms Kendall earlier in