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Sir Keir Starmer batted away questions over his suspension of seven Labour MPs on Wednesday, following a move that signalled the new prime minister will take a robust approach to party discipline.
Labour suspended seven leftwing MPs, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, for six months after they rebelled and backed a Scottish National party amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted.
At his first Prime Minister’s Questions in office on Wednesday, Starmer said the government would approach child poverty with vigour and had established a ministerial task force on the matter.
A Labour party spokesperson said that “voting against the party’s position on the King’s Speech is a serious matter”. They said the government was drawing up measures to address child poverty.
“We are very clear we aren’t going to make promises we can’t keep,” they added.
The cap stops most parents claiming additional child-related welfare payments if they have more than two children. Removing it would cost £3.4bn each year but lift roughly 500,000 children out of poverty, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank.
Although party whips had warned MPs that they would lose the whip if they backed the SNP amendment, the decision to make them sit as independents is unprecedented.
On Monday Starmer raised the prospect of lifting the benefit cap after Bridget Phillipson, education secretary, stated that ministers would consider scrapping it “as one of a number of levers” as part of the taskforce’s work.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said there was no established deadline for when the task force would report its findings and terms of reference had not been created.
Philip Cowley, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said the decision to suspend a handful of MPs sent a clear signal over rebellion and party discipline. He said no new Labour MPs had backed the amendment, but cautioned that removing the whip had limited traction.
“It might work as a short-term hit but in the long term it builds up problems,” Cowley added. “You can’t govern like this at all times.”
Starmer suffered a major rebellion in November last year over his party’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war, with 10 Labour frontbenchers quitting and 46 other MPs defying him to back a parliamentary motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Labour leader did not suspend MPs following the vote.
About 42 Labour MPs did not vote on Tuesday, including several frontbench figures who were absent from parliament on government business, with several understood to have abstained. The SNP amendment was rejected by 363 votes to 103.
Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said she could not attend the vote for personal reasons but was “horrified” that colleagues had been suspended.
The two-child benefit cap affected 1.6mn children in the year to April 2024, up from 1.5mn in the previous 12 months, according to data from the Department for Work and Pensions.
The measure was introduced by the previous Conservative government in April 2017, and has long been opposed by many Labour MPs — deputy prime minister Angela Rayner previously called the policy “obscene”.
Separately, Labour announced that Eluned Morgan, currently Welsh health minister, is set to be appointed first minister of Wales after the party said no other candidates had entered the race.
Morgan will replace Vaughan Gething, who was first minister for barely four months before he lost the confidence of his own party over questions about donations he took during the leadership race.
