𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Rachel Reeves has insisted that her decision to lift the two child benefit cap was not fuelled by a desire to appease her backbenchers.

This measure, which cost around £3billion a year, was a demand of the Labour backbenchers and something the government said it could not afford last year.

She said: “Look, I’m a Labour chancellor. I want to reduce child poverty. I make no apologies for that.”

When Sir Trevor Phillips asked why a woman with two children should pay to support the children of another woman who has more than two, Ms Reeves again speaks about wanting to reduce child poverty.

She also stated that she would rather talk about families than women when it comes to parenting children.

The Chancellor says she is a “mum with two children”, and she is “very happy to support children from poorer backgrounds live more fulfilling lives”.

“When I became chancellor, I said that I knew that my time as chancellor would have been a success if there are ordinary children from working class backgrounds living more fulfilling lives, and I think it is very difficult to live a fulfilling life when you’re growing up in poverty,” she adds.

The Chancellor argued the two child benefit needs to be scrapped to get rid of the rape clause, that forced parents of nonconsensual children to prove they were the consequence of rape to get benefits for them past the two child cap.

Sir Trevor said that this is not the case for most of the children who will benefit from the cap being lifted.

Meanwhile, Ms Reeves insisted that having £4.2 billion headroom against the fiscal rules would not have been enough.

The Chancellor told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: “If I was on this programme today and I said I’ve got a £4.2 billion surplus, you would have said, and rightly so, ‘that is not enough, Chancellor’.”

She added: “I said in that speech that I wanted to achieve three things in the Budget: tackling the cost of living, which is why I took £150 off of energy bills, and froze prescription charges and rail fares.

“I wanted to continue to cut NHS waiting lists, which is why I protected NHS spending, and I wanted to bring the debt and the borrowing down, which is one of the reasons why I increased the headroom of £4 billion.

“The headroom would not have been enough, and it would not give the Bank of England space to continue to cut interest rates.”