Paying endless amounts of money to people on benefits who decide to have large families is “madness”, welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith said today.
In an outspoken interview, he said benefits were encouraging the poorest to have big families and that it would be fairer to the “vast majority” of taxpayers if payments were limited to the first two children.
“When you look at families across the board, at all incomes, you find the vast majority make decisions about the kind of numbers of children they have, the families they want, based on what they think they can afford and how it is going to work,” Mr Duncan Smith told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said very large families tended to be found among those on “the very lowest incomes”, on “significant levels of welfare” or the very richest.
“This is madness. It is madness also for the taxpayer,” he said. “We have accepted for far too long that it is possible for people to just stay on benefits and we write them off.”
His comments came ahead of a keynote speech tonight, committing the Conservatives to a further £10 billion of welfare cuts, including slashing housing benefit for the under-25s and reducing financial support for very large families.
But a source close to Deputy PM Nick Clegg stressed that they were not Coalition official policy. “Nothing has been agreed within government on these policies,” said the source.
