Being poor in the UK is an expensive business

theguardian.com:

Things really began to turn for PJ when his mother died a couple of years ago. He’d been her carer, he explained to me when we spoke in early July, though she’d spent the last few months of her life in a nursing home. After her death, with no money and nowhere to go, the south Londoner rapidly found himself slipping into homelessness.

As he approached his 60th birthday, life was tough. Work was and remains hard to come by and it was difficult to see how or when circumstances might improve. After a month or so, he was rehoused in a north London studio flat. That was around the same time that he started visiting Margins, a drop-in centre based out of Union Chapel, a cultural venue and homelessness charity in Islington. With the help of their support workers, things gradually began to turn. He received help navigating the welfare system and has settled into something like a routine, however fragile.

For millions like PJ, the cost of living crisis didn’t suddenly materialise in 2022. The poor, so it runs, have always been with us, though the last 12 years of Conservative rule has witnessed poverty accelerate sharply across the UK. It’s well understood that this was part of a carefully developed political programme. From 2010, a decade of austerity saw £37bn slashed from the welfare system. Food banks became a shameful fact of life. Wages have continued to stagnate and access to stable, even halfway affordable housing has become increasingly chimerical. The most up-to-date figures show that 13 million people were living in relative poverty in 2020-21, with another seven million living in a state of perpetual “financial fear”, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Fear, that is, of having to choose between which basic