Britain may emerge from the coronavirus crisis with renewed support for the welfare state, says the new Labour MP in charge of benefits policy.

Jonathan Reynolds, who represents Stalybridge and Hyde, said the current pandemic proves the need for ‘a safety net when times get hard’, while promising to immediately push the government over gaps in the system.

Mr Reynolds was promoted to shadow work and pensions secretary on Monday amid a crisis that has already seen a million people apply for Universal Credit in three weeks.

He said the pandemic had underlined a ‘two tier’ system of employment in this country that has meant some people are able to work from home with no drop in pay, while others are left struggling to cope.

And he told the M.E.N. a massive priority for Labour in the longer term would now be cutting child poverty, arguing previous party commitments to the task had not been sufficiently ambitious.

(Image: Darren Quinton/Birmingham Live)

Describing himself as ‘incredibly proud’ to have been given the role by new Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, he said: “My priorities are to first of all work with the government to respond to the current crisis as best as possible - and a big part of that for me is finding out and making sure that the Universal Credit system can cope.

“I think a lot of the coverage so far has rightly been about the scale of the applications, which obviously has hit a million, which is about ten times higher - but the question has got to be: can we make sure it can cope with that volume of people?

"This a massive increase in volume."

He pointed to huge administrative burdens on the benefits system as a result of the coronavirus crisis, including the verification of new claimants, and said he would be meeting with the Secretary of State next Wednesday to discuss how it is coping.

“The second part is obviously that the crisis shows how vulnerable some people are, that the safety net they might have expected isn’t really there, that we have this two-tier approach to employment where some people will be able to work from home - will be able to receive their pay as normal - but for some people, they can’t,” he said.

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“The government schemes are welcome, but there are still gaps in them.”

He pointed to four key groups of people not currently covered by government support - those who have just been laid off and are waiting for support, self employed people who won’t get support until June, people who have had their hours cut, and ‘microbusinesses’ of just a few people who pay themselves through periodic dividends throughout the year, which he said applied to a great many people across the region.

He also reiterated Labour’s pledge in the longer term to scrap Universal Credit, but said it was too soon to say what form that would take.

“I think the brand is really damaged in many people’s eyes because it is associated with a very punitive system, one that is essentially premised around the idea that people are dishonest and need punitive measures to get back in the labour market, when we know a lot of that isn’t true,” he said.

He said the ‘absolute number one problem’ with the benefit was the current five-week wait, pointing out that his local borough of Tameside was an initial pilot area, but lessons did not seem to have been learned.

“When I look at the problems all over the country - where it’s still not rolled out, because it won’t be fully rolled out until 2026 - all the problems of the pathfinder, which we identified in places like Tameside, all those lessons have largely been ignored,” he said, adding that Labour would seek a system that was easily understood and easily accessed, although it was too soon to provide specifics of how it would work.

“The wait has come down to five weeks from six weeks, but that still isn’t the overall solution so we’re going to replace it with a different benefit.

"It won't have things like the five week wait or the two-child limit, because the priority will be an adequate safety net for people who need it - and a huge attack on child poverty.”

Child poverty would be a key priority for Labour under Sir Keir Starmer, he said, arguing his party had not gone far enough in its ambitions over recent years.

“I’m pretty sure that the last two Labour manifestos were not ambitious enough on child poverty - child poverty would have gone down by about 500,000 under that, but that would have been a slowing in the increase, rather than a reduction," he said.

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“I don’t think that’s ambitious at all. I think there’s no reason why we’d have so many children in poverty in the UK.

"We should have a clear plan to reduce that, as was once the aspiration of both main political parties.”

He suggested the coronavirus may now galvanise a growing support for the welfare system, however, arguing ‘most people will come through this with a belief that we need to make sure that we have a welfare state that really covers people when times get hard’.

“I’m not taking it for granted - often in the middle of a crisis it feels like things are different to how they come out at the end and, to be honest, I didn’t really see the 2008 financial crisis as something that would usher in this period of very right wing austerity after a banking crisis, but that is what happened,” he said, but argued the growing divide between young and old would continue to play out.

“I think there will be a moment. I don't mean people will be necessarily interpreting that in a left or right wing way. I mean the principle of: there should be - for people who put in of working age - a system to look after us when there are harder times.

"And we should always be looking after people who can’t work, with disabilities, and so on.

“I think there will be more public support for that if we can design a system that’s adequate. Because there’s no doubt what we’ve gone into this crisis with has not been a sufficient welfare state to cope with the problems.”