Brown pleads with No 10 to scrap two-child benefit cap

Former PM backs gambling tax reforms to raise the funds

- MILLIE COOKE POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

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.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former prime minister issued a stark warning about the state of Britain after 14 years of austerity under the Conservatives, urging the current government to take action. “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 builtin 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.”