‘Starve and shiver with Sunak’ is the reality for millions. The chancellor can – and must – stop it

theguardian.com:

We are only in mid-June, but the 30 staff at the Kirkcaldy Cottage Family Centre in the community where I grew up are dreading October, and what will happen when family fuel bills start to average an unprecedented £55 a week.

Already volunteers and staff are stocking up on blankets, duvets, sheets and pillows, warm children’s clothes, and even sleeping bags and hot-water bottles.

Once our focus was on keeping houses warm; now our ambitions have had to narrow: just keeping children and pensioners warm.

And so, starting with one church in Gateshead that has already received funding to open a warm safe space, many faith groups I know are discussing how to designate their buildings as places where you can come to keep warm – local heating hubs. One consumer champion is suggesting local authorities open up what would literally be “hotspots” where, just like heated station waiting rooms, people looking for warmth can come inside from the cold,, when every room in their own home is freezing and too expensive to heat.

For despite his promises to do what it takes, the chancellor has left millions of families even worse off than last year and facing their most difficult winter ever. Nothing Rishi Sunak offered in his third budget in a year will prevent child poverty moving beyond 5 million for the first time since statistics were published, 60 years ago.

Already, as impoverished families face the choice between feeding themselves and feeding their gas and electricity meter, we are seeing the rapid spread in Wales, with the support of Mark Drakeford, of the fuel bank – joining food banks, bedding banks, clothes banks and baby banks substituting for the welfare state as our last line of defence against poverty.

Now too, social prescribing