The UK is experiencing some of the worst poverty in 60 years, Gordon Brown has warned as he called on the government to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
The former Labour PM has this week urged Rachel Reeves to raise gambling taxes to help generate the £2.3bn which could fund scrapping the two-child cap.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Brown said Britain was a “divided” country experiencing a “social crisis.”
Specifically, he mentioned the two-child benefit cap introduced by George Osborne in 2017 as a key factor in poverty figures.
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He said: “Look, we’re dealing with a divided Britain. We’re dealing with a social crisis. This problem is getting worse. It’s going to worsen over the next few years, because there’s a built-in escalator in the poverty figures because of the two-child rule.”
He added: “I live in the constituency in which I grew up. I still live here. I see every day this situation getting worse, and I did not think I would see the kind of poverty I saw when I was growing up, when we had slum housing, when we had travelling people coming to my school.
“This is a return to the kind of poverty of 60 years ago, and I think we’ve got to act now, and that’s why it’s urgent that we take action in this Budget.”
Brown was speaking after a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that around half a million children could be lifted out of poverty through the reforms.
Following the report and Brown’s comments, Reeves refused to rule out hiking gambling tax at her next budget.
Asked whether she was considering the gambling tax reform, the chancellor told reporters in south Wales: “No child should grow up hungry, or parents not be able to afford the basics for their family.
“We’re a Labour government. Of course we care about child poverty. That’s why one of the first things we did as a government was to set up a child poverty taskforce that will be reporting in the autumn, and [we will] respond to it then.”
She added: “We’ve already launched a review into gambling taxes. We’re taking evidence on that at the moment and, again, we’ll set out our policies in the normal way, in our Budget later this year.”