A change to one of the founding principles of the EU – freedom of movement – should be introduced to prevent EU citizens travelling to Britain in search of a job, the shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, has said.

As a leading European commissioner accused the British government of peddling myths about migrants, Umunna said highly skilled EU citizens should be banned from taking low-skilled jobs in Britain.

Speaking on BBC1's Question Time on Thursday night, Umunna said the last Labour government had been wrong not to impose work restrictions on Poland and seven other eastern European countries when they joined the EU in 2004.

Umunna said the EU should change its rules to prevent citizens from travelling to other member states in search of work, with a focus on banning highly skilled workers from less affluent EU members taking low-skilled jobs in richer member states.

Umunna's intervention came after Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European commission in charge of justice, accused British ministers of telling untruths about the number of EU citizens claiming benefits in the UK. In a webchat, the Luxembourg commissioner said: "Most of the things which are told to the people in Great Britain are myths, have nothing to do with reality."

Umunna made clear that Labour needed to show it was on the side of EU reform and change the rules on freedom of movement. He said this would revive the spirit of the EU's founding fathers, who wanted to encourage freedom of movement for highly skilled workers to highly skilled jobs.

The shadow business secretary told Question Time: "On low-skill immigration we believe there was too much of it from the EU. There is one important thing about the EU. The founders of the EU had in mind free movement of workers, not free movement of job seekers. Undoubtedly we do have to work with our European partners to deal with that. I met with a number of them this week. They are very open to that if we constructively engage with them instead of saying do what we want otherwise we are going to walk off.

"What people intended when they built the EU in the first instance is that people who either had a job or had the skills to get a job would move around the EU. The problem we have at the moment is that you had during our time in office – and this was where we did make a mistake –high-skilled people coming from other countries to do low-skilled jobs here."

Umunna's proposals echo a call by Ed Balls in an Observer article during the 2010 Labour leadership contest. His ideas go further in some respects than those proposed by David Cameron, who is calling for restrictions to be imposed on EU benefit claimants.

The prime minister has said restrictions could only be imposed on those from future EU member states. Nick Clegg has said EU rules entitled citizens to travel across the EU in search of work.

The House of Lords is preparing to debate a backbench bill that would allow a referendum on Britain's EU membership by 2017. Lord Dobbs, the Tory peer who wrote the TV political thriller House of Cards and who is promoting the bill, said a poll was needed because the EU had become a "pestilence".

Dobbs told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Nobody below the age of 60 has ever had a chance to have a say about this. Europe has changed beyond imagination since then [the 1975 referendum]. It has become a pestilence, it has become a poison in our political system. It dominates so much of our political dialogue. We need to get rid of this burden. We need to decide one way or the other whether we are going to stick with Europe or whether we are going to leave it."