Families who wreak "havoc and mayhem" in poor areas should have their benefits stopped and their children taken into care, former welfare reform minister, Frank Field, has said.

The MP for Birkenhead, who resigned his government post in 1998, told a commons debate that threatening to force problem families into homelessness also had to be considered.

During the second reading of the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Bill, he said that a small minority of people behaved in a "totally unacceptable" way.

He explained that he would like to see the government's scheme to stop benefits when community orders are breached to include trouble-makers on estates.

He said: "We are faced in some of our poorest areas with a new form of barbarism which is totally unacceptable.

"And the majority of decent poor people do not see why they should pay their taxes and try to bring up their children to be good citizens when sadly a small but growing proportion of a local community can run amok with those standards."

He added: "We are seeing only the beginning of how our constituents will make proper demands on us on how we use the benefit system to try to guard and improve behaviour, particularly in the poorest areas."

And he said that people causing trouble should not be guaranteed housing benefit and a roof over their heads just because they have children.

He said: "The demand already from my constituents - and I am more than happy to make their case here this evening - is that those parents should lose housing benefit, their children should be taken into care and they find what it is like not having a home."