Nothing prepared me for the child poverty I see in Britain. November’s budget can and must halt its inexorable rise

The Norwood and Brixton food bank at St Margaret's the Queen church in London, November 2023. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

Run-down housing estates in Britain’s former industrial heartlands remind us of the poverty described by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 – but these days there is no Orwell to chronicle what the arithmetic of deprivation means for families condemned to lives of poverty.

Millions of children, as the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, told us this summer, are faring very badly, living in “almost Dickensian levels of poverty”. And what she calls the striking awareness children have of being poor requires us to find a modern-day Dickens to hear their voices.