The former prime minister Gordon Brown has launched a scathing attack on the unprecedented cuts to UK aid, saying they put at risk tens of thousands of children’s lives while millions more face losing an education. Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the planned cuts of 30% – £5bn – which come into force at the end of next month meant that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was “paying the bills for Covid off the backs of the poor – at home and abroad”. Brown’s intervention comes amid a chorus of increasingly dire forecasts, including from the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and development experts, who have warned that two decades of progress in reducing extreme poverty have been moved into reverse. The elimination of poverty is one of the key sustainable development goals. The World Bank warned of a “truly unprecedented increase” in levels this year as it updated its prediction for the expected number of newly impoverished people to rise from 88-115 million to 119-124 million. Describing the return of extreme poverty after decades of sustained reduction as the “great reversal”, the former prime minister, who is a passionate campaigner on development issues, called for a new global growth and development plan. At its centre, he said, should be a $1.2tn “Marshall-style” plan for Africa as well urgent debt restructuring for the most impoverished countries. The Marshall plan was a US initiative to provide foreign aid to western Europe following the second world war. Saying that the cuts “shamed” Britain, Brown added: “Never in our history has the overseas aid budget been cut so peremptorily, so savagely and by so much.” Writing that it would take “decades to undo the damage that is about to be inflicted”, Brown continued: “[It] is so severe that it is in breach of UK law, and current legislation will have to be repealed for it to be implemented. “And we have to ask: what moral compass is it that guides government ministers towards severing lifelines of support in the midst of the most devastating peacetime humanitarian emergency in a century? “For 20 years until now, the UK aid budget has risen, and global poverty has fallen,” he added saying that the cuts would reduce Britain’s aid budget by share of national income to below that of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. “Now, for the first time in two decades, global poverty is rising but, sadly, development aid is falling. We are depriving the world’s most vulnerable of food, medical treatment, and schooling, as surely as pulling away the needle from a child awaiting vaccination, whipping away the school meal from her hungry mouth and shutting the school gates on all those whose human right to education we promised to uphold. “Over 5 million young people will be denied the vaccinations for polio, measles and others they require, with the result that, according to a calculation by the Centre for Global Development, 100,000 children’s lives that could have been saved will be lost. Four-and-a-half million fewer children a year will receive an education.”