A NORTH-EAST MP has given a rallying call for people to mount a "popular resistance" against the Government's welfare reforms.

Laura Pidcock told the Commons that Universal Credit was a benefit created by people who "know little or nothing about poverty".

The North West Durham MP's comments came as members debated the Government's release of internal Universal Credit assessment papers.

Ms Pidcock said: "People in work and out of work are enduring an ill thought out experiment, it's an experiment based on deeply flawed assumptions about what causes worklessness and what creates low pay.

"It's based on the deeply flawed model of what traps people in a cycle of debt and financial crisis and it's a deeply flawed ideology created by people who know little or nothing about poverty and what it means to struggle in that poverty."

She added: "We need popular resistance to this Government, a Government that have repeatedly told us that everything is fine, until they concede on another wholly inappropriate part of the Universal Credit system."

Ms Pidcock repeatedly refused interventions from Tory MPs saying: "I have heard enough of their contributions about my community."

Tory MP Stephen Kerr (Stirling), who followed Ms Piddock, described her comments as a "to the barricades speech".

Earlier in the debate SNP MP Philippa Whitford also took aim at the Government's reforms saying they had impacted on women particularly.

She said: "No one knows the moment life can change, you can't suddenly put your child in the bin because your circumstances have changed and you've been made redundant, its ridiculous."