A photograph circulating on Facebook purporting to show a large family in Sheffield celebrating the Labour government’s decision to scrap the two-child benefit limit has been miscaptioned, reports Reuters. The image in fact dates from 2014 and depicts a father and some of his 36 children in north-west Pakistan.
The post, shared on 26 November, the day of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Autumn Budget, shows a man surrounded by a crowd of children, with the caption: “Family from Sheffield welcome labour removing two child benefit limit.” Comments beneath the post indicate that many users believed the claim and used it to criticise the government’s change in welfare policy.
The photograph has no connection to Britain, Sheffield or the 2025 decision to lift the cap. It was taken on 11 July 2014 in Bannu, a city in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, by a photographer working for the news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP). AFP’s original caption identifies the man as Haji Gulzar Khan Wazir, an internally displaced resident from North Waziristan, and notes that he has 36 children.
The image was shot during a major Pakistani military operation in North Waziristan against Taliban and other militant groups, which forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Contemporary reporting in Pakistan and international outlets used the photograph as part of a human-interest story about Wazir and his extended family, who had fled their village and were living in cramped conditions after leaving behind a large compound shared with relatives.
Verification is straightforward for anyone checking the picture’s provenance. A reverse image search links the photograph to AFP’s archive and to 2014 news coverage from Pakistan, all of which place it in Bannu and describe the subject as a displaced tribal elder. The date stamp, location and detailed captioning pre‑date the UK’s two-child benefit policy and the current government by more than a decade.
Despite this, the recent Facebook post has been treated by some users as evidence of supposed abuse of the British welfare system. “In this day and age 2 children should be enough for anyone. If you want more do so but don’t expect other people to keep them,” one commenter wrote. Another claimed that lifting the cap would prompt “young women” to have more children “because of this change”, adding that there was “no help for the elderly”.
The reaction reflects a wider political row over Reeves’s decision to abolish the two-child limit on some benefit payments from April 2026. Introduced by the Conservative government in 2017, the policy restricts child tax credit and the child element of Universal Credit to the first two children in most low‑income families, with a small number of exemptions. Critics have long argued that it is a major driver of child poverty.
In her Budget speech on 26 November, Reeves said she would not “preside over a status quo that punishes children for the circumstances of their birth”. Official forecasts suggest removing the cap will cost around £3 billion a year by 2029–30 and increase payments for roughly 560,000 families, with the government estimating that about 450,000 children will be lifted out of poverty by the end of the Parliament.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has defended the original limit, arguing that it “strikes the right balance between supporting people who are struggling and protecting taxpayers who are struggling themselves”. She has accused Labour of losing control of welfare spending and framed the change as unfair to households who limit their family size without relying on benefits.
The miscaptioned photograph has tapped into this debate, visually reinforcing a long‑running narrative about “irresponsible” large families living on state support. Analysts and campaigners have warned that some right‑wing social media accounts have used images of large, typically non‑white families – sometimes without context or with fabricated captions – to suggest that minority ethnic or Muslim households are the main beneficiaries of welfare changes.
In this case, there is no evidence connecting Wazir or any of the children pictured to the United Kingdom. Publicly available records and the original AFP caption make clear that the family were living as internally displaced people in Pakistan at the time the image was taken. The photograph predates both the creation of the UK’s two‑child limit and its planned abolition.
The episode illustrates how archived news photographs can be stripped of their context and redeployed in domestic political arguments, particularly around emotive issues such as welfare, immigration and race. It also underlines the importance of basic verification tools – such as reverse image searches and checking agency captions – for social media users confronted with striking images attached to provocative claims.
Verdict: the Facebook post is misleading. The picture does not show a Sheffield family responding to the 2025 scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, but a Pakistani father and some of his 36 children photographed in Bannu in 2014 after fleeing fighting in North Waziristan.