A donation bin appears in the supermarket 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 being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.
The research-released last week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) - lays out the scale of destitution and 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 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.
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