Lord Carey says his fellow bishops are wrong to oppose the Government’s proposed cap on welfare benefits.

Writing in the Daily Mail today, the former Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledged the good intentions of Church of England bishops who objected to the cap at £26,000 a year, but said they “cannot lay claim to the moral high ground”.

“The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today,” he said.

“If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.

“In order to do this, we desperately need to reform our welfare system.”

Aside from the financial imperative for reform, the former Archbishop said the social importance of the planned changes “cannot be underestimated”, especially among the “squeezed middle” frustrated at having to fund the welfare state while bearing the brunt of the cuts.

“The truth is that the welfare system has gone from the insurance-based safety-net that William Beveridge envisaged in 1942 (designed to tackle the ‘Giant Evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’) to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all,” he said.

“In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility.”

Noting the concern of many Christians that the welfare of children will be compromised by the benefits cap, Lord Carey said he “can’t possibly believe prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children”.

Recalling his own materially impoverished childhood on a 1940s council estate in Dagenham - one of the poorest parts of London - Lord Carey praised his parents’ generation for their “unfailing work ethic” and their belief that “our lives could be more prosperous than theirs if we applied ourselves”.

“The debate this week about welfare has centred around material poverty — on how many thousands of pounds per year each family receives, and if children have to share bedrooms. Yet young people raised in workless households suffer far more acutely from poverty of aspiration than from any material poverty,” he said.

“These children have no role models to illustrate how liberating a lifetime of work can be — materially and spiritually.”