London(UK)- Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are coming under growing pressure to explain how they would help British families with the cost of living crisis this autumn.
With inflation set to spike above 13% in October, the energy price cap expected to surge and a recession forecast by the year’s end, economic policy has become the defining issue of the Conservative leadership campaign.
A row broke out over the weekend after Ms Truss told the Financial Times that she planned to lower taxes rather than offer handouts.
This prompted a swift rebuke from Mr Sunak, who said it is “simply wrong to rule out further direct support” for struggling families this winter.
Supporters of Ms Truss later told Sky News that her remarks had been “misinterpreted”.
Mr Brown, himself an ex-chancellor, is calling for the COBRA emergency committee to sit in a “permanent session” during the current crisis.
He is also calling for parliament to be recalled as urgent unless Boris Johnson and both Tory leadership candidates can agree on an emergency budget in the coming days.
In the Daily Mirror, Mr Brown said: “Even if Boris Johnson has now gone on holiday, his deputies should be negotiating hard to buy new oil and gas supplies from other countries, and they should be urgently creating the extra storage capacity that we currently lack.”
And he warned that some of the tax cuts proposed throughout the leadership race “will not benefit those who are poor”.
Over the weekend, a report commissioned by Mr Brown warned some low-income families are up to £1,600 a year worse off as a result of the cost of living crisis following a triple blow to their earnings – even after government support is taken into account.
While working-age households on Universal Credit and other means-tested benefits are getting up to £1,200 additional help, poverty expert Professor Donald Hirsch said these measures had been overshadowed.