Scrap Universal Credit roll-out to avoid public disorder, Gordon Brown warns

The former prime minister and chancellor said Downing Street would have to go back to the drawing board on the welfare scheme to avoid 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 said 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 predicted half of children in his hometown of Kirkcaldy, Fife, would be in poverty in the near future as child poverty is rising and is expected to hit five million in 2022.

He said: “Most in the people in poverty in Kirkcaldy are in work and the rest of the people are either in work and disabled or out of work because they are disabled, and that’s how children are forced into poverty.”

He added: “I say now that the right thing to do is to abandon the national roll-out of Universal Credit.

“With three million people who will be pushed on to it from next summer, the right thing to do is to review it and see if it can be made better or alternatively replaced.”

He continued: “Just like the poll tax, and we will have chaos like the poll tax after next summer as a result of this, you cannot reform this with simply transitional payments.

“You’ve got to go back to the drawing board as they had to do with poll tax and see if it works.”

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.”