Starmer announces child poverty taskforce to stave off revolt

Keir Starmer has tried to stave off a revolt on the two-child benefit cap by announcing a child poverty taskforce. The Prime Minister told the Commons that the taskforce would ‘devise a strategy to drive the numbers down’, and that it would not just focus on one policy area. He was responding to an intervention on his King’s Speech address to the Commons from one of his own backbenchers, Sarah Owen, who asked him for assurances that he ‘personally takes this issue very seriously’. It was the first intervention on Starmer’s speech, and underlined the strength of feeling on the Labour benches, let alone across the House of Commons, about the government’s failure to scrap the benefit cap in today’s Speech. 

Owen didn’t look very convinced by the answer. Her colleague Kim Johnson can now table her amendment to the Speech, which a number of Labour MPs have indicated they are keen to support.