Next month’s budget must “draw a line in the sand” after the Government’s “mistakes”, Labour deputy leadership hopeful Lucy Powell has said.
The Manchester Central MP told the PA news agency that Rachel Reeves’s statement should act as a follow-up to Sir Keir Starmer’s conference speech, giving “a clear articulation of the core purpose of the Labour Government”.
Ms Powell told PA: “What I’ve been saying through this campaign is that we just need to give a really clear sense of who we are, whose side we’re on.”
She added: “I think the budget is another moment for us to really draw a line in the sand on some of the mistakes we’ve made over the last 15 months, and set out that really strong agenda and that really strong purpose.”
Ms Powell, seen as the frontrunner to succeed Angela Rayner, told PA that part of that process should include lifting the two-child benefit cap, a policy that has formed a major part of her deputy leadership bid.
The budget is widely expected to include at least a partial lifting of the cap, with the Chancellor facing pressure from both Ms Powell and her rival for the deputy leadership, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
Ms Phillipson has also called for the cap to be lifted, saying over the weekend she was “confident” the Government would “do the right thing”.
On Monday, Ms Powell met child poverty campaigners convened by former prime minister Gordon Brown in London.
Mr Brown has not endorsed a deputy leadership candidate, and met Ms Phillipson in Scotland last week.
After the meeting in London, he said he was “delighted to welcome Lucy Powell to this meeting with a number of charities that are really concerned about child poverty”.
He added: “Lucy has taken this up in her campaign. We’ve met the Child Poverty Action Group, we’ve met FareShare, we’ve met the churches and faith groups who are concerned about child poverty and Lucy is determined to do something about it.”
Ms Powell told PA the meeting had shown her how “urgent” the need to lift the cap was.
She said: “As we approach the budget, I think it’s just really important that we do this, but we do it in a way that we are able to make the moral case and the political case for this being at the heart of what a Labour Government is about, which is lifting children out of poverty and tackling the scourge of poverty.”
