Britain on its knees That food banks are needed is a national scandal

In Leeds, a child fails to turn up at school because she and her mother are sharing her family's one and only pair of shoes.

- Gordon Brown

In Liverpool, one of two brothers turns up for football training each week because they are sharing the one pair of football boots the family can afford.

In Swansea, a girl is bullied at school by her classmates because she has no trainers at all. In Wigan, a teenage schoolgirl is found walking alone on a Saturday wearing her school uniform and explains that these are the only clothes she has.

These experiences of hardship, relayed to me while travelling around Britain, are just the tip of an iceberg of widespread destitution and national shame. The far more severe suffering of 3 million children at the sharpest end of our poverty emergency is unseen and unreported, often hidden even from neighbours and friends.

These millions start the day going to school hungry, regularly miss out on meals and, teachers report, are exhausted and unable to study for lack of nutrition.

Most of them do not have the luxury of school breakfast clubs. Even the inspirational charity Magic Breakfast, which serves 30m breakfasts a year to 200,000 children, has been forced to reduce its service owing to shortages of supplies.

A quarter of state school pupils in England now qualify for free school meals, but at least 800,000 more schoolchildren who are living in poverty go hungry because they are not eligible. The school holidays are nearly upon us and, as the Food Foundation and Marcus Rashford's campaign highlight, there are too few out-of-term lunch clubs.

These are austerity's children - millions of boys and girls living through what is for them the "hungry 20s" in food bank Britain.