POLL tax riots-style "chaos" will result if the Government pushes on with the national Universal Credit roll out, Gordon Brown has warned.

The former prime minister and chancellor branded the welfare reforms a "harmful and hated" experiment that will risk public disorder.

His intervention came after charities warned the nationwide introduction of Universal Credit would trigger a surge in the number of people using food banks.

According to reports, millions of families could be left up to £200-a-month worse off when the new system is introduced in July.

In a speech at the University of Edinburgh, in memory of the late Motor Neurone Disease campaigner Gordon Aikman, Mr Brown will say Universal Credit would remove £3 billion from the social security budget on top of cuts to child tax credits and benefit, which he helped introduce.

He is expected to say: "For the first time that any of us can remember, the safety net is not now the welfare state but charity and the lifeline for families in need is not social security but food banks.

"In my own home town food bank demand has doubled in just a year because of Universal Credit and the benefit changes around it as family after family is pushed into poverty."

He will warn child poverty is rising "inexorably" and is expected to hit five million in 2022.

"A return to poll tax-style chaos in a summer of discontent lies ahead," he is expected to add.

"So I am calling today for the Government to abandon the 2019 national roll out of Universal Credit and end this harsh, harmful and hated experiment."

Along with Mr Brown, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby are among a growing number of figures to call for the roll-out to be halted.

Labour had planned on pausing the roll-out if it gets into Government, but Mr McDonnell said the party would now scrap it.

Touted as the most radical reform to welfare since the Second World War, Universal Credit rolls six means-tested benefits and tax credits into one payment.

It is also designed to encourage people to take up work by ensuring they will always be better off having a job.

However, critics have warned that in areas where it has already been introduced there has been an increase in food bank use.

The Trussell Trust, a charity that runs hundreds of food banks across the country, also said it received reports people had not been able to access the help they require under the new system.

There are concerns that the number of people who have to reapply when it is rolled out next year will place the system under significant pressure.

The Government has announced it will give Citizens Advice £39 million to help people claim.

The poll tax riots in March 1990 erupted after a peaceful march by 70,000 protesters in London broke down into violent disorder.

There were 400 arrests and 113 people, including 45 police, were injured.

The march was in opposition to the Community Charge, dubbed the poll tax, which later became council tax.

The riots contributed to the the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, who resigned as prime minister in November 1990.

A senior Labour source stressed the party does not support rioting, saying: "As Jeremy (Corbyn) has said, the system certainly isn't working and needs to be scrapped and the dangers of that are clear."

Mr Corbyn believes the Universal Credit system "is penalising people in a brutal and deeply damaging way", they added.

A Downing Street source said: "I'm not sure that the Prime Minister is going to take any lessons from Gordon Brown on this particular issue.

"Under his system of tax credits, not only... did some people have unclaimed benefits because the system was too complicated, you also had a situation where MPs were recipients of benefits.

"It was clearly a system that doesn't work and we think Universal Credit is better."