Inside the UK’s ‘stressful’ cost of living crisis Burnham hopes to tackle

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Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts scale behind stories like O’Hara’s.

“We estimate 7.4 million low-income families were unable to afford at least one essential item in the last six months,” said Sam Tims, the charity’s lead analyst, pointing to cutbacks on heating, toiletries and food. “This is at a record high.”

Tims traced the roots directly to policy choices.

“The combination of all these damaging structural factors has left our economy weaker, our wages lower, our rents higher and our income safety net in need of repair,” he said, noting that the basic rate of Universal Credit support is lower now than a decade ago.

He welcomes the removal of the two-child benefit limit in April, estimated to have lifted about half a million children out of poverty, but argues it needs to be paired with a “protected minimum floor” in Universal Credit and higher local housing allowance rates to make private rents affordable again.

Adam Lang, director of policy at Carnegie UK, says the think tank’s polling shows just more than a quarter of households could not afford an unexpected 850-pound ($1,150) expense, and one in 20 cannot afford to feed everyone at home.

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“What is striking is that we’ve conducted the same survey for the last three years and we see no real improvement on most of these measures,” he said.

Lang cautiously supports Burnham’s approach, but warned against expecting a single set of measures to fix things.

“It is heartening to hear the UK government talk of a 10-year plan,” he said. “On the other hand, it is clear that life is too hard for too many and change is required.”

He argued that governments need to track wellbeing alongside growth and employment, so policymakers can see “not just how the economy is performing, but how people are doing”.

Evelyn Henderson-Child, senior researcher at the Centre for Local Economies (CLES), said that even when growth does happen, it does not reliably reach those navigating the crisis.

“GDP [Gross domestic product] can kind of swish on upwards while the foundational conditions of life, community resilience and people’s financial stability are eroded,” she said, pointing out that growth-focused policy tends to prioritise high-productivity sectors while overlooking the ones that actually sustain society and offer significant amounts of employment, such as food, retail, transport, housing and care.

The answer lies less in growth itself and more in who benefits from it, she believes.

“Traditional policy tends to rely on patching up inequality, if it does at all, after wealth is generated and concentrated at the top,” she said. “It’s about pre-distribution, rewiring the economic system from the get-go so that economic and social benefits are spread more evenly.”

But the debate over growth statistics and structural reform is of little consequence for O’Hara.

“Some people say ‘work on a budget’. Try working on a budget when you have to count your pennies just to get a loaf of bread,” she said. “It’s not my fault I got cancer and can’t go to work. Life shouldn’t be like that.”