Needs and Entitlements: Welfare reform and larger families

This report captures the findings of a three-year research project, the first to comprehensively assess how the benefit cap and the two-child limit affects families with three or more children. We urge policymakers to engage with, and act on, this timely and powerful evidence. Our evidence provides an overwhelming and, we would argue, unassailable case for the need to end both the two-child limit and the benefit cap, and to centre support for families with children in a much more positive light within the social security system. Future research is needed to monitor the impacts of both of these policies in the longer term, to explore the relationship between housing costs and the benefit cap, and to find out more about the impacts of the policies on children by speaking directly to them.