The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!

But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.

> One million of these children are destitute, going without their most basic needs of staying warm, dry, clothed and fed being met

This is still scandalous in a highly developed country like the UK.

Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative...

The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.

While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.

That'll definitely help. But you need a certain amount of forced re-distribution to reduce relative poverty significantly below 30% because it's defined as 60% of median.

Either that or find a way to significantly reduce the number of children that people in the bottom 30% are sprogging.

The total wealth owned by UK billionaires is estimated at a small fraction of that (£300b?). Even seizing all of it isn't going to solve anything long-term (but will create new long-term problems)