“In years to come, I believe people will be asking how it was that government walked by on the other side when thousands of children were suffering abject deprivation, and failed to support them in their hours of need,” he said.
He described the poverty he had witnessed in his home town of Kirkcaldy, where 70% of children were in poverty in some neighbourhoods, as the worst he had seen in his lifetime.
“In 2010, we were helping 100 children at Christmas [through charity schemes]. Last Christmas, it was 1,800,” he said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Britain is in the throes of a hidden poverty “epidemic”, with the worst-affected households living in squalor and going without food, heating and everyday basics such as clean clothes and toothpaste, the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has said.
Brown accused the government of creating a wall of silence around “obscene” levels of destitution in the UK and criticised ministers for “systematically shredding” a social security system that had once provided a safety net for the poorest.
He said it was a “moral outrage” that the government was unwilling to tackle a social emergency that had created millions of forgotten and voiceless victims, one he compared in an article for the Guardian with the Post Office scandal in terms of the scale of ministerial neglect.
He called on Hunt to undertake a root-and-branch review of universal credit, and extend the government’s £900m cost of living crisis household support fund, currently at risk of being axed from April.
As a chancellor and then prime minister in Labour governments between 1997 and 2010, Brown oversaw ambitious plans that significantly reduced levels of UK poverty through spending on tax credits and social programmes such as the minimum wage and Sure Start.
It was currently inadequate to meet basic living costs and, for many families, was further weakened by cash deductions made through the two-child limit, benefit cap and bedroom tax.
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