Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown Spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former prime minister issued a stark warning about the state of Britain after fourteen years of austerity under the Conservatives, urging the current government to take action.
Britain has not seen poverty this bad for more than half a century, Gordon Brown has warned as he urged Sir Keir Starmer to scrap the two-child benefit cap at the next Budget.The former Labour prime minister and chancellor – who said “we are dealing with a divided Britain” and described it as a “social crisis” – backed the introduction of reforms to gambling taxes in order to generate the £3.2bn needed to scrap the cap.
Mr Brown said the gambling industry is “undertaxed”, throwing his weight behind a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which said that around half a million children could be lifted out of poverty through the reforms.
The two-child benefit cap, which was introduced by Conservative chancellor George Osborne, prevents parents from claiming benefits for a third or subsequent child born after April 2017.
“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 it’s urgent that we take action in this Budget.”
Speaking to ITV, he added: “You cannot have a situation where, under a Labour government, child poverty numbers just go up, and up, and up.”
Rachel Reeves left the door open to a hike in gambling tax following Mr Brown’s comments, saying she had spoken with the former prime minister last week and that she is “deeply concerned around the levels of child poverty in Britain”.
Asked whether she was considering his proposals, the chancellor said on a visit to Dyffryn, 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.”
Sir Keir Starmer is thought to be personally in favour of scrapping the cap, but after a number of expensive U-turns and a new report from top economists warning that the chancellor is facing a £51bn black hole in the public finances, there are growing questions over how the prime minister would be able to fund such a move.
MPs from across Labour have repeatedly urged the prime minister to scrap or ease the limit as concern grows over the direction of the party. Critics of the policy say removing it would be the most effective way of reducing child poverty, amid warnings that as many as 100 children are pulled into poverty every day because of the cap.
Kate Osborne, the Labour MP for Jarrow and Gateshead East, backed Mr Brown’s intervention, saying she “completely agrees” with the former prime minister and urging the government to scrap the two-child benefit cap “as soon as possible”.
No comments:
Post a Comment