Gordon Brown has called for a “war against poverty” to combat escalating rates of deprivation in the North East.
The former Prime Minister has warned that rising food and energy bills will “savage” standards of living in the coming months and called on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to reverse the £20 cut to Universal Credit cut from last October.
He was speaking to an audience of city leaders in Newcastle during a virtual discussion on Tuesday evening about closing the nation’s poverty gap, the Government’s levelling up agenda, and the challenges posed by climate change.
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Mr Brown, who served as Labour’s Chancellor from 1997 to 2007 before succeeding Tony Blair as Prime Minister, told the Newcastle City Council policy cabinet event that child poverty rates in the North East had risen “so fast” since 2015 and that around 40% of youngsters in the region now lived below the poverty line – “a really big figure that has got to be dealt with”.
Urging local councils and devolved governments to “really push” Mr Sunak to reinstate the £20 benefits uplift and provide more heating help for struggling families, he said: “We need an anti-poverty strategy, we need what America talked about in the 1960s – a war against poverty.
“I was looking at the figures before I came on and the estimate is that in the three regions of the north of Britain, a young child born today will have a life expectancy six years less than in the three more prosperous regions of the south.
“We cannot allow this discrepancy, this disparity in life chances to continue. We can’t have a situation where kids are not just missing out on certain things… but to be left out permanently and not to be able to enjoy the things other kids are enjoying.
"Not to be able to have kids visit your home, not being able to participate in sports activities because you have to get the kit, not to have the sort of food you need to give you nutrition. We cannot allow this to happen. Child poverty is an evil and it has got to be dealt with.”
City council leader Nick Forbes, who chaired Tuesday’s discussion, said that fighting poverty had become like “swimming against the tide”, as Mr Brown spoke about the rising numbers of not only food banks – but banks for bedding, clothes, and baby supplies.
The ex-PM, now a United Nations special envoy for global education, said he believes that the British people have “changed their views” on the role of welfare and “want more fairness in our society” – but that the Government “still works on some of the assumptions of the poor house, the workhouse – that people are lazy, that they are indolent, that they are not to be trusted to work hard”.
He added that rising food and energy bills “are actually going to savage many people's standards of living” and that local councils and charities “cannot compensate for Government cuts at the level of benefits rising only 3% when inflation is 7% or 8% and, of course, with that £20 cut which is clearly something that should never have been done”.
The 71-year-old, who played a prominent role in the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK during the 2014 independence referendum, also called for cities like Newcastle to be given greater powers over issues like skills, planning, transport, housing.
He called Boris Johnson’s promises to level up the North “more cosmetic in the short term” and “not the kind of transformation that people should expect when you talk about narrowing the gap and equalising the opportunities and possibilities between the North and the South”.
Mr Brown also talked up the prospect of climate change being a “huge job creator” on Tyneside through the development of renewable energy.
He said: “Newcastle has suffered so much from the loss of shipbuilding and heavy industries, but at the same time you could be leading the second energy revolution. You lead the first, you could lead the second.”
