One in Five

The urgent reality of what it means to experience poverty in modern-day Britain.

In this country, we hear about child poverty, in-work poverty, fuel poverty and poverty porn. We read about universal credit cuts, generation rent and Benefits Street. We see a fifth of our population through someone else’s lens, as victims or slackers or – just occasionally – inspiring national heroes who turned their lives around.

But we rarely hear from people who live with poverty every day.

One in Five explains the reality of spending all day shopping around online for the cheapest school shoes, only to be told off for owning a phone. Of scrubbing stains out of old clothes by hand, and the precise cost of a job interview outfit. It shows how disability, ethnicity, gender, ill health and unstable work or housing can all intersect to create an inescapable poverty trap. And how sometimes, living in poverty becomes a full-time job.

But is also a book of ideas. You don’t raise a family in a rented flat on minimum wage without learning a thing or two about life, quick thinking and BOGOFs, and the contributors to this book understand better than most how the system is broken and what could be done to fix it – if the political will existed.