With hygiene banks now joining food banks and clothes banks, I’m calling on retailers to take drastic action and help their poorest customers
Poverty will last until doomsday if this Conservative government is all that confronts it. The so-called “budget for growth”, more accurately titled the “budget for growth in poverty”, has done nothing for our 271,000 homeless people, the 400,000 children who tonight will sleep without a bed of their own, the 14 million condemned to damp or substandard housing. Nor will it prevent suffering for the 7.5m UK households who are in fuel poverty.
The threat posed by rising destitution is now so serious that hard-pressed, under-resourced charities will have to give up on helping the hungry so they can focus on the starving, opt out of helping the inadequately housed so they can help the homeless and turn their attention from supporting the down-at-heel to rescuing the down and out.
Gordon Brown is the WHO ambassador for global health financing, and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
