Why poverty in UK is now worse than 50 years ago

For all the progress we've made, in 2025, destitution – going without two of seven essentials such as food, toiletries or shelter – is rising faster than deep poverty

- reports Zoë Beaty

“We're dealing with a divided Britain. We're dealing with a social crisis,” Gordon Brown said last week. It was a stark warning, yes, of the realities of a country steeped in instability – but it was also a recognition of something unnerving: regression.

“I live in the constituency in which I grew up,” the former prime minister continued telling the host of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday. “I still live here. I see every day this situation getting worse, and I did not think I would see the kind of poverty I saw when I was growing up; when we had slum housing, when we had travelling people coming to my school.

“This is a return to the kind of poverty of 60 years ago, and I think we’ve got to act now. And that’s why it’s urgent that we take action in this Budget,” he said.

Brown’s comments came as he backed reforms to gambling taxes in order to generate the £3.2bn needed to scrap the two-child benefit cap - a policy that is now estimated to affect the lives of more than 1.5 million children. And his admission carries with it an unsettling truth: that, in 2025, the UK is not only facing new forms of deprivation, but potentially circling back to old ones, too.

Perhaps, half a century ago, it was easier to see. Back then, poverty appeared to live primarily in ghettoised estates – sprawling pillars of concrete; reeking stairwells, broken swings; kids playing outside in coats too small for them. In 1975, poverty had a physical presence in picket lines and soup kitchen queues, in a way that we’d like to imagine is now confined to sepia-tinged photos and “gritty” ITV dramas or Ken Loach films.

But the decades since have not only dramatically transformed wealth and living standards, but what poverty looks like, too. Things have, undoubtedly, improved - on the surface anyway.