In 2015, then British chancellor George Osborne introduced a cap on social benefits available to families with children. Osborne justified the policy, which limits benefit eligibility for families with more than two children, using the repugnant and familiar rhetoric of incentives: he claimed it would help encourage unemployed parents to work and “ensure that families in receipt of benefits faced the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely in work.”

Evaluated even on these rather grotesque terms, the policy has been a failure. Research published last year shows that punishing Britain’s poorest families with benefit cuts has done nothing to discourage them from having children, though it has succeeded in pushing them further into poverty. Today roughly 10 percent of British children are affected by Osborne’s hideous two-child benefit cap — which can be worth as much as £3,000 (or roughly $3,900) per child every year.

According to more recent research commissioned by Labour MP Jon Trickett, simply nixing the policy would lift about 270,000 households — representing nearly a million people — out of poverty at a cost of £1.7 billion. “The consequences of this cruel Tory policy on pushing people to the brink of destitution is clear,” Trickett remarked in the Daily Mirror. “But we see that a relatively small increase in social security spending would have a huge impact on the life chances of hundreds of thousands of deprived families.”