It has taken Britain over 50 years to become this poor, and Gordon Brown has warned that Sir Keir Starmer at the next Budget must get rid of the two-child benefit cap.
The ex-Labour chancellor and prime minister – the one who claimed ‘we are dealing with dividing Britain and said Britain and said it was a social crisis’- supported the move to introduce reforms on gambling taxes to raise this PS3.2bn to lift the cap.
Mr Brown added the gambling business is undertaxed, throwing his support behind an Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) report which estimated that the reforms would lift approximately half a million children out of poverty.
The introduction of the two-child benefit cap by Conservative chancellor George Osborne resulted in parents no longer being able to claim benefits on a third or subsequent child born after April 2017.
Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York and primate of England, said: “I have seen the extent of child poverty in the UK and I say this: the two-child benefit cap must go“.
In an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the ex-prime minister delivered a straightforward message to the current regime, warning about the state of Britain following 14 years of austerity under the Conservatives and the need to act.
“Look, we’re dealing with a divided Britain. We’re dealing with a social crisis,” he said. “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 we must take action in this budget.”
On a visit to Dyffryn, in South Wales, the chancellor was asked whether she had been listening to his proposals, and replied: No child must go hungry, nor should parents not be able to afford the necessities of 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.”
