“Extreme poverty – where families are routinely unable to afford regular meals, wash clothes or provide their children with basic items such as beds and sheets – is becoming more common, according to frontline family support workers.
Three-quarters of support professionals such as health visitors and social workers said they had seen an increase in the numbers of families they regularly worked with who experienced destitution and were in need of basic financial support.
Despite more families facing greater difficulties, official support was harder to come by, the survey found. “The only substantive increase in support over the last year was the increase in the number of families support workers have seen using food banks,” it read.
The survey of 1,290 frontline family support workers from 616 organisations across the UK was published by the poverty grants charity Buttle UK. It said it was undertaken to provide a “thermometer reading” of the lives of some the UK’s most vulnerable families.
It comes amid rising concern that alongside headline increases in relative poverty in recent years – more than 4 million children in the UK live below the breadline – a cohort of the very poorest families is experiencing the extreme and intractable form of poverty known as destitution.
Destitution is defined as experience of at least two of six measures over the previous month, including eating fewer than two meals a day for two or more days; or as a weekly income after housing costs of £70 for a single adult or £140 for a couple with children – an amount below which people “cannot meet their core material needs for basic physiological functioning from their own resources”.
Last week, the MPs Frank Field and Heidi Allen warned that austerity cuts meant that the poorest communities were now “blighted by the constant spectre of destitution”. An estimated 1.5 million people in the UK, including 350,00 children, experienced destitution in 2017. …”
East Devon Watch 