Ryan Shorthouse, the director of the pressure group Bright Blue, said the government needed to match “welcome rhetoric” about supporting working class families with policies.

Warning that inflation was hitting ordinary working families badly, he said: “Reductions in the generosity of universal credit and the ongoing freeze on in-work benefits are disproportionate and unnecessary. In this parliament and the next, the government should prioritise softening the blow on the living standards of these families and ensure the burden of austerity falls more on those with broader shoulders.”

Shorthouse said the money could be raised by looking again at cuts to taxes for the wealthy, citing inheritance tax but also by ending the higher rate reliefs on private pensions and means-testing universal benefits for older people such as the winter fuel allowance and bus passes.