It starts slowly at first. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in Tesco for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.
Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8 million people experienced destitution in the UK last year. That’s the equivalent of almost half the population of London being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.
The research – released on Tuesday by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) – lays out starkly not simply the scale of destitution in this country, but how potently it has spread. The number of people experiencing destitution in the UK has more than doubled in the last five years – up from 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in destitute homes – a staggering increase of 186% in half a decade. The research, part of a project that has been monitoring the scale of destitution since 2015, found almost two-thirds of adults who are in severe poverty have a disability or long-term health condition; cancer patients going to chemotherapy and coming home to wear a coat in their freezing homes.
“Destitute” is a term that conjures up the Victorian era – a living standard so sparse, so removed from modern civilisation, that by all rights it should be consigned to the history books. You only have to read through the aching interviews in the JRF study to see what destitution in modern Britain looks like: children wearing their parents’ clothes because that’s all there is in the wardrobe; eating a banana as a single daytime meal; taking the one permitted toilet roll a week from the local church donation. Gone are the workhouses. Nowadays, we send the poor to sift through charity bins.
It would be natural to call this a social emergency, but that would suggest a sense of urgency that our political class has rarely demonstrated. Poverty has long been the background noise in Westminster while “real issues” such as small boats and woke elites define the national conversation. Rishi Sunak is reportedly now lining up a tax cut for the wealthiest earners and inheritors, to win back upper-middle-class voters. Meanwhile, food banks have become such an established fixture in Britain that they have been left to breed ever more horrifying iterations like “warm banks” and “baby banks” with barely a whisper. Almost every library in England, Wales and Northern Ireland plans to provide a free warm space for people who can’t afford the heating this winter, while there are thought to be 200 hubs nationwide distributing donations for deprived infants. New mothers queuing up in a community hall for donated nappies is “the new normal” and it has been normal for a while.
Over the last decade, billionaire-backed press and wealthy ministers have worked to propagate the myth that this deprivation has nothing to do with Conservative policies, blaming structural inequality on the working class’s apparent idleness and overspending. Or, as Andrew Cooper, the Tory candidate in last week’s Tamworth byelection, put it: jobless parents who are struggling to feed their children while paying for a phone should “fuck off”.
In reality, a decade of austerity and squeezed wages and benefits has ripped the social fabric, making large swathes of the population poorer, sicker and more insecure. At the same time, multiple crises – Brexit, the pandemic, soaring inflation – have exposed the gaping holes in the safety net once intended to catch us.
It is telling that nearly three-quarters of destitute households actually receive support from the benefits system, according to the JRF study. Or to put it another way: after a decade of benefits freezes, cuts and sanctions, social security rates are now so meagre that many of those who are “lucky” enough to qualify often still can’t afford to eat, wash or pay the rent. It is not as if this is an accident. Keeping benefits as low as possible has always been deliberate, a so-called legitimate means for ministers to divide the undeserving sick and poor from “hardworking families”. In this context, severe poverty is less a problem to fix than an accepted part of the status quo. It is destitution by design, where governments know which public policy will push the already struggling into dire conditions, and they implement it anyway.
If that sounds bleak, there is hope in it, too: when poverty is a political choice, politicians can choose to lift people out of hardship instead. As a society, we can take steps to invest in the poorest lives. We can increase social security rates to reflect the real cost of living and scrap sanctions on the unemployed and sick; we can tackle debt by, for example, reducing the amount of money the government can take from people’s benefits for repayments; we can introduce a real living wage to end poverty wages; we can build more social housing to free tenants from extortionate private rents.
Providing this economic security would improve not simply people’s material conditions, but their physical and mental wellbeing, too. After all, destitution isn’t simply about skipping meals. It is a psychological assault: lying awake at night anxious about the bailiffs knocking, or counting the slices of bread in the cupboard, wondering which day your children won’t get breakfast this week. Protecting people from destitution won’t just give them more cash in their pocket – it can give them part of themselves back.
Established wisdom says now is not the time for any of this, that a struggling economy means we cannot afford to do better. I would suggest we cannot afford not to. When Keir Starmer recently ruled out scrapping the two-child benefit limit (a move that would lift about 270,000 households with children out of poverty) he cited the need for “tough decisions” in order to be fiscally responsible. And yet true responsibility – fiscal as well as moral – comes from tackling the vast cost of social and economic hardship. In many ways, this is a matter of simple maths: child poverty alone is estimated to be now costing the economy £39bn a year due to the extra strain on public services and future unemployment. In the long run, doing the right thing is reassuringly cost-effective.
But it is also surely about a collective lowering of expectations: the nagging fatigue that says that, in one of the richest nations on Earth, millions of people going without the basics for sustaining life is “just the way it is”. Infants sleep on the floor. Mothers eat a piece of fruit for lunch. It starts slowly, yes, but we should all fear where it ends.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
