Dutch Minister of Social Affairs and Employment Lodewijk Asscher (left) | Martijn Beekman/AFP via Getty Images Dutch minister urges free movement reform Lodewijk Asscher also wants to force the UK to get tough on tax avoidance.

Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher said that the European Union's commitment to freedom of movement needs urgent reform to curb immigration and wage depression.

Free movement of people is the most controversial of the EU's so-called four freedoms, which also guarantee free movement of goods, services and capital. Euroskeptics resent the inability to limit EU immigration and dislike of the policy contributed to British voters' decision to leave the bloc.

Asscher told the BBC that free movement had led to cheap, imported labor undercutting workers' wages. He added that the Brexit vote was a golden opportunity to change the rules.

"In essence [what] we have seen happening [is] that free movement has become synonymous with a race to the bottom, with undercutting of wages, with unfair competition in the labor market and that has to do with the rules Europe has produced itself," Asscher said.

"On the scaffolding [site] you can see a Romanian or Portuguese painter doing the exact same work as a Dutch painter right next to him that is allowed to earn two, three, four hundred euros less than the Dutch worker," he added, referring to EU rules allowing companies to temporarily send workers to other countries without having to comply with local social-security obligations.

Asscher also said that enforcing the principal of equal pay for equal work would rein in EU migration.

The Netherlands' far-right Freedom Party — which is gaining in the polls ahead of the country's March election — is heavily critical of immigration and wants to withdraw from the EU.

Some see Asscher's statement on freedom of movement as a way to boost his increasingly unpopular Labour Party, according to the BBC.

In a separate development, Asscher said that the Netherlands will block any trade deal with the U.K. post-Brexit that does not require the latter to sign up to stringent tax-avoidance rules.

"Let’s fight the race to the bottom for profits taxation together, which threatens to come into existence if it is up to the Conservative U.K. government," he wrote to EU left-leaning party leaders, in a letter seen by the Guardian.