WELCOME TO CHRISTMAS 2023

Food bank queues around the corner, a doubling of extreme poverty, people dying because of cold homes...

- David Cohen

LAETITIA lives with her newborn daughter and son in a London house with four other families and an infestation of mice in the communal kitchen. They have a sparsely furnished room with a bed, a cot and a broken cupboard from which all their possessions spill out. Laetitia struggles to sleep because tenants shout through thin walls, while her four-year-old son is terrified of the mice and won’t go into the kitchen.

The gently-spoken 28-year-old is desperate to move and has been trying to save some universal credit to put down a deposit on a private rental. But Laetitia is classified as “destitute”, falling below the weekly £155 income threshold for the size of her household, and has just £10 a day to buy food, so saving is not an option.

Laetitia’s back-up plan was to skimp on food bills by relying on her local food bank in east London, but after dropping her son at nursery, the queue was around the block. She waited, but by the time she had to leave to pick up her son from nursery two hours later, she had still not reached the front — and left with nothing. Across London, food banks report queues doubling. At a church in north London , the queue for the 10am weekly food bank starts forming in the dark at 3am, with some 550 people collecting food by closing time, according to the organisers. I watched as the line — including mothers with babies — kept growing, winding around the block. And this was in Crouch End, a relatively affluent part of Haringey.

Now Christmas is coming, but for Laetitia (not her real name) that means more stress. “I am on medication for anxiety,” she said. “Christmas brings pressure to buy things I cannot afford. My son is asking for a train set like his friends at school, but how do I explain?”