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With the UK poverty crisis escalating and local elections showing appetite for change, Big Issue Group wants poverty prevention at the heart of the next government’s agenda.

There are now more food banks being operated in schools than outside them as increasing numbers of families face food insecurity.

The latest UK child poverty figures make for grim reading. Last Thursday’s 2022-23 Households Below Average Income statistics show that at a national level, nearly one in five children (2.6 million in total) are living in absolute poverty before housing costs, and one in four (3.6 million) after housing costs. This marks the largest annual increase in absolute child poverty for 30 years.

The annual release of DWP’s Households Below Average Income (HBAI) figures is far less timely than other economic indicators and, as it is based on survey data, it is noisy. Yet, together with the ONS’s separate income survey data (expected later in Spring), it provides key insights into how living standards have changed for different groups.

The DWP has today released its Households Below Average Income statistics, which show that child poverty has reached a record high – with 4.3 million children in the UK now below the poverty line.

Nearly fifth of population struggled with basic needs, it emerges, as charities accuse government of failing poorest

The UK is entering this election year with unacceptably high levels of poverty, appallingly high for some groups. We need a coherent plan with creative policies to end poverty in the UK.

The financial impacts of Brexit have left UK business investment levels "chilled", according to the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

THE surge in child-poverty rates — to a record high of 4.3 million children in the past financial year — is “shocking”, the Archbishop of York has said.

In the week it was announced that 300,000 more children were plunged into absolute poverty in a single year at the height of the cost of living crisis, amid soaring levels of hunger and food bank use, the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems all united to condemn Nike’s new St George Cross design on the England Euro shirt and demand a return to the original. Rishi Sunak told Nike: “Don’t mess with our national flags.”

YESTERDAY’S official poverty statistics show child poverty has reached a record high with an estimated 100,000 more children pulled into poverty last year.  

Prioritising tax cuts for the better off while letting children bear the brunt of financial hardship is not only cruel, it makes no financial sense

The proportion of families with disabled children who are living in poverty rose by nearly a third in two years, even before the cost-of-living crisis, according to a new poverty measurement being developed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

New analysis in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) flagship UK Poverty report quantifies for the first time how many thousands of pounds are needed by families to escape poverty – and how that has got worse over time.