Mothers in legal contest over two-child benefit cap 'rape clause'
She told the court that both women were young and vulnerable when they began relationships in their teens and first became pregnant.She explained that they were subjected to regular violence and coercion, with one describing how she was choked to unconsciousness and raped multiple times.
'Anomaly in the rules'
Ms Monaghan explained how LMN had older children in care and two living with her, but then one of the older children returned to her home.She then had three children living in her home, but she was refused an exception to the two-child limit under these "ordering provisions" relating to non-consensual conceptions.Ms Monaghan said EFG had two children who were conceived non-consensually and then another from a consensual relationship.She was initially paid the child element of universal credit for this third child, but this was later rescinded, after a fourth child was born.Ms Monaghan told the judge, Mrs Justice Collins Rice, the state had an obligation under Article 3, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, to ensure that "women are not penalised" and "they have the resources to support themselves".The barrister said that, if this anomaly in the rules was rectified, "we are talking about a drop in an ocean", in the face of a £300 billion-plus national benefits budget.Neither of the women, whose representation is being provided by Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), were in court on Tuesday.
Galina Ward KC, for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), told the court that the exceptions to the two-child cap, which also include circumstances around kinship care and multiple births, were intended to "kick-in" when women are not able to make a choice about having a child.She said this case was "fundamentally different" to one which was the subject of a 2018 High Court ruling that similar exception rules relating to children in kinship care arrangements were unlawful.She said the DWP also did not accept that women who have non-consensually conceived children and then choose to have another child "are making a fundamentally different choice" to women whose children are consensually conceived.The case continues on.
Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
13 minutes ago
- The Independent
Football supporters now have a bigger say in how their clubs are run
The Football Governance Act has officially become UK law after receiving royal assent, establishing an independent regulator for English football. This landmark legislation introduces a watchdog for the top five tiers of the men's game, aiming to ensure clubs are run sustainably and are accountable to their supporters. The new regulator will possess 'backstop' powers to impose financial settlements between the English Football League (EFL) and the Premier League if they fail to reach an agreement. The Act's journey to law was prompted by the attempted European Super League breakaway and numerous instances of clubs facing financial distress and mismanagement. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy highlighted that the Act delivers on promises to fans, protecting cherished clubs and their vital role in communities.
The Independent
13 minutes ago
- The Independent
How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?
N igel Farage claims that he has a plan to 'cut crime in half, take back control of our streets, [and] take back control of our courts and prisons '. The Reform leader says that 'we are facing nothing short of societal collapse', wants to build emergency 'Nightingale prisons ' on Ministry of Defence land, and has semi-promised to send convicted murderer Ian Huntley to El Salvador (admittedly a bit of a vote winner). It's an ambitious package, but there are questions about its viability... Is Britain facing societal collapse? No. If it was, you wouldn't get back alive from the pub or be able to get petrol or bread. Is crime up? On some measures and in some places, against certain given periods of time, it is up; on other measures, it's down. The variations in the way crime is measured are one issue – it's risky to go by the number of crimes recorded by the police, because people will sometimes not bother to report them, especially the less serious matters, so statisticians treat these figures with caution. The other way of measuring crime rates, which should also be adjusted for changes in population, is by conducting surveys among the public – but not everything is included. Somewhat confusingly, Farage seems to think that the survey data is unreliable because people have given up telling the police about, for example, thefts that might affect their insurance. That doesn't make sense. Types of crime also necessarily change over time; there are very few thefts of car radios or bank blags these days, but there's massively more cybercrime and fraud. Even in London, described by Farage as 'lawless', not all crime is up; there's a long-term trend down in murder and rape, for example, and there are still plenty of tourists. So fact-checking any politician on the subject of crime is virtually impossible. All such claims need to be treated with the utmost care. What about the costings? Farage presented a 'costings sheet' that purports to show that the whole massive package – recruiting 30,000 more police, opening new 'custody suites', restoring magistrates' court operations, building prisons, paying rent for offenders deported to prisons in El Salvador or Estonia, and the rest – would come to £17.4bn over a five-year parliament: a mere £3.48bn per annum. The costings seem to be optimistic, based on some arbitrary assumptions such as always being able to cut costs to a minimum. They are not independently audited by, say, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and if it were really all so cheap to do, the Tories and Labour would surely have taken the opportunity to transform the crime scene and turn Britain into a paradise long ago. As for funding even the admitted £17.4bn, there are no specific named savings elsewhere, just some recycled claims about the (contested) cost of net zero and the supposed economic miracle wrought in Argentina by President Milei. Probably not enough to calm the bond markets under a Farage government. Is the UK 'close to civil disobedience on a vast scale'? So Farage claims. His critics say that his 'I predict a riot' remarks tend to have a self-fulfilling quality to them, as seen in the 'Farage riots' in Southport and elsewhere a year ago. Essex Police, who are currently dealing with violent unrest in Epping – perpetrated by 'a few bad eggs', as Farage terms it – won't thank him for his comments. And the anecdotes? Uncheckable, just as Enoch Powell's were in the infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. We may never know whether, for example, a former army sergeant was denied a job as a police officer because the force was 'having trouble with its quotas' or for some other reason. Reform's tactics are also reminiscent of the Trump playbook, demonstrating an obsession with incarceration and policing by fear. If Farage could build a British Alligator Alcatraz on a disused RAF base in Suffolk, he probably would. But using grass snakes, presumably. Can Farage cut crime in half in five years? It feels implausible. If he could, then presumably he could abolish crime altogether if he were given a decade in office. The 'zero tolerance' approach sounds fine, but if the pledge that every shoplifting offence, every whiff of a spliff, and every trackable mobile phone theft has to be investigated is taken literally – as he seems to intend – then even 30,000 more officers wouldn't be sufficient, and the expanded court and prison system would collapse. Much the same goes for 'saturation' levels of policing deployed on stop-and-search exercises in high-knife-crime areas. Sending many more people to jail is also very costly, but, more to the point, the recent Gauke report explains why prison doesn't work and just makes everything worse. To get crime down under Reform UK, we'd need to turn the UK into a police state.
The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Abolishing Ofwat is fine but not enough: teach water bosses that failure has consequences
In a bone dry summer, every drop of water counts. So, even though the rain is finally falling again now, it's still hard to take it for granted, or to ignore the way that everything in the countryside still feels unnervingly out of rhythm: earth too cracked, grass too bleached, wheat harvest being brought in too early, rivers too low – and, knowing what Thames Water has been pumping into them, water quite possibly too dirty to cool off in. In May, the company was fined £122.7m for the combined sins of sewage dumping and continuing to pay shareholder dividends despite its environmental failings. It responded by protesting that it might go bust if actually held accountable for its actions, a sentence that sums up everything people find infuriating about the water industry. Yet its resentful customers have no choice but to keep paying bills that are expected to rise by a third over the next five years – though Thames Water, inevitably, asked to be allowed to charge more – while wondering how we ever let a commodity this precious become so badly managed, heading into a volatile new era of summer drought and winter flood. Rivers, Jon Cunliffe notes in his newly published review of what a new Labour government should do about the water industry, are part of a country's national identity. There's a romance and a history to be preserved here, not just a life-giving water supply to be extracted or wildlife habitats to be protected. Being a neutral civil servant, what he doesn't explicitly add is that lately they have also come to symbolise corporate failure and decline of the public realm, but that too is part of the picture. Few will disagree with Cunliffe's verdict that the current regulator, Ofwat, isn't up to negotiating the complex trade-offs involved here, and that there should be a new watchdog, bringing together various powers currently scattered across Whitehall, with the ability to take control of failing water companies if needed. His ideas for increasing accountability, curbing excessive dividends and creating a new social tariff for those who can't afford to pay is welcome too. (Bills were kept too low for too long, the review concludes, meaning that when the inevitable hike came it was painfully sharp.) But that's the easy bit, compared with facing up to the consequences of chronic underinvestment by an industry that has in parts seemed quick to take the profits and slower to take responsibility. There will be outrage on the left that Cunliffe doesn't advocate nationalisation, though politically that idea was off the table before he started. (Labour said before the election that it wasn't keen to take water back into public ownership, and nothing about the fiscal hole in which it has since found itself has made the idea of spending billions on doing so more appealing: Cunliffe's terms of reference were set accordingly.) The review argues that ownership models are anyway something of a red herring – water is nationalised in Scotland but bathing water quality isn't much better there than it is south of the border, and while Welsh Water's not-for-profit model could be viable for some English companies, even that isn't necessarily a magic bullet. All of which may well be true, but might sound more convincing had ministers given him free rein to consider all the options equally. As it is, it's hardly his fault that this plan – which would still see water bills rising steeply to fund the investment in creaking infrastructure that everyone accepts is necessary – is the answer of the Treasury official he used to be, rather than of a politician. Where's the moral hazard, the price any private business should be forced to pay for failure, if in the end their customers just get stuck with the tab? It's not our fault if companies who were granted a monopoly back in 1989 over the supply of something humans literally can't live without still managed somehow to make a commercial hash of it. No wonder the water minister, Emma Hardy, will take the summer to decide exactly which of Cunliffe's recommendations Labour plans to accept. The dilemma this government finds itself in over water is, of course, not unique. It is part of a common thread now linking everything from welfare reform and the still unresolved problem of funding social care, to the momentous decisions on tax now facing Rachel Reeves in her autumn budget; that these are all expensive and deep-seated problems this government's predecessors repeatedly dodged or kicked down the road. And, although Labour's commitment to actually facing reality is admirable, it turns out there were good reasons everyone else chose to bravely run away. Years of ducking and diving have only magnified those problems, to the point where selling the kind of sacrifices now required to a reluctant public is almost impossible. Getting the future governance of the industry right is crucial, of course, but that's not the end of it. Thames Water should be allowed to fail, on the grounds that it has done nothing to deserve a taxpayer bailout, and if its lenders have to take a hit, well, them's the risks. Parliament should keep digging, investigating the historic failures of oversight that allowed us to get into this mess. But, somehow, ministers need to find a broader way of conveying that failure has consequences, and not just for the taxpayer. A harder rain needs to fall, not just into rapidly shrinking reservoirs, but on to some of those responsible for managing them. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
