Cost of living: Gordon Brown urges action on extreme poverty

Parents are struggling to keep their children warm at night due to the cost of living crisis, says Gordon Brown.

The former Labour prime minister said there was a growing need for pillows, duvets, sheets and even beds as people were left sleeping on the floor.

Mr Brown and Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford have written to Rishi Sunak to ask for more help for the poorest.

Mr Sunak promised to "stand by" those struggling with the soaring cost of essentials in his Spring Statement.

The chancellor insisted the measures he announced on Wednesday - including increasing the point at which workers start paying National Insurance - would help those on the lowest wages most.

But he said it was impossible for him to "fully compensate" people for spiralling energy costs, a challenge the UK was "not alone" in facing.

Think tanks analysing his mini-Budget said that while those on low incomes would benefit from the changes, Mr Sunak had done nothing to help people on benefits, who would see their incomes fall further.

Conservative MP Stephen McPartland told BBC Radio 4's The World At One the chancellor needs to "do more" to alleviate the rise in the cost of living, warning further price rises will hit households later this year.

He said Mr Sunak should be "sitting down, working out what we can do" to help - saying while the chancellor had committed "billions of pounds" in the statement, he thought it was "a missed opportunity".

'They are sleeping on the floor'

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Mr Brown - who was chancellor for 10 years before becoming prime minister in 2007 - said he was hearing stories of poverty he had never expected to hear.

"Parents are reluctant to turn up their heating and that's why there is a huge demand for sheets, for pillows, for duvets, for anything that will provide warmth to their children during these colder nights and this will be worse when it gets to the autumn," he said.

"I [heard of] three children sleeping under one sheet. You have got people who don't have the bedding absolutely necessary for their children and they are sleeping on the floor."

Mr Brown blamed the situation on benefits being frozen for seven of the last 10 years, and that child benefit was now worth 20% less than it was in 2010.

He has written to Mr Sunak, alongside Labour council leaders, metro mayors and Mr Drakeford, to call for next month's hike in National Insurance to be scrapped, as well as bringing back the £20 uplift to universal credit and uprating benefits in line with the current rate of inflation.

"Any caring and compassionate chancellor would want to do something about this poverty," said Mr Brown, warning the Tories could become known again as "the nasty party".

"This is an emergency, it is a cost of living crisis and you cannot ignore the needs of people who are having to chose between putting their heating up... and feeding their children," he added.

"That is simply not an acceptable situation.

"There is an urgency about the chancellor acting and this is something he cannot turn his back away from."