A few weeks ago, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that 3.8 million people in the UK – more than one in 20 of us – had experienced “destitution”. For most of my lifetime, I had regarded the word “destitution” as something of an historical artefact, a relic of Dickensian novels and the Great Depression of the inter-war years. Poverty has always been with us – I grew up in the 1980s in a single parent family and was on free school meals. But deep, grinding poverty is back. Decades of progress are being unravelled. The JRF defines destitution as “when people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed”. Think about that for a minute: one in every 20 of us, and approximately one in 15 children (two in every classroom), are struggling to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.