British households are only halfway through a two-year cost of living crisis, with average incomes likely to fall by more than £2,000, a leading thinktank has warned.

Typical disposable incomes for working-age family households are on track to fall by 3% in this financial year, and by 4% in the year to April 2024, according to the Resolution Foundation.

Only incomes of the very richest will rise, according to the thinktank’s annual Living Standards Outlook for 2023, while middle-income households will struggle to make ends meet after an average £2,100 loss.

The warning comes amid a rash of strikes by workers demanding pay rises closer to the average inflation rate of 10.7%.

A vote by teachers is expected to back strike action when the ballot results are announced over the next fortnight, adding more than 500,000 public sector workers to a tally that includes nurses, Whitehall civil servants and Border Force staff.

Every month there’s a new figure for inflation – it estimates how much prices are rising across all the goods and services in the economy.

In the 12 months to November 2022 the figure was 10.7%. That means things costing £1 in November 2021 cost more than £1.10 the same time the following year.

Our personal inflation calculator, built by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in collaboration with the BBC, shows you what the inflation rate is for your household, and identifies the items in your household budget that have gone up the most in price over the past year.

Thousands of work coaches will be hired under a new government employment programme to help those who have lost their jobs during the pandemic, amid fresh warnings of an unemployment crisis as the furlough scheme ends.

The £238m job entry targeted support (Jets) scheme will help jobseekers who have been out of work for at least three months. It will be available to people receiving the “all work related requirements” universal credit payment, or the new style jobseeker’s allowance.

The Department for Work and Pensions says Jets will “ramp up support” to help people back to employment, with specialist advice on how to move into growing sectors, as well as CV and interview coaching. It is recruiting an additional 13,500 coaches to help deliver the programme.

The move comes as economists forecast a sharp increase in unemployment this winter, with employers such as Rolls-Royce, Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, Boots and John Lewis all announcing layoffs since the pandemic began. More than a third of businesses plan to cut jobs before the end of the year, a survey last week found.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who will give a speech to the Conservative party conference on Monday, said: “Our unprecedented support has protected millions of livelihoods and businesses since the start of the pandemic, but I’ve always been clear that we can’t save every job.

Only 6% of the public want to return to the same type of economy as before the coronavirus pandemic, according to new polling, as trade unions, business groups and religious and civic leaders unite in calling for a fairer financial recovery.

The former head of the civil service Bob Kerslake, the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the heads of the Trades Union Congress, Confederation of British Industry and the British Chambers of Commerce are among 350 influential figures wanting a “fairer and greener” economic rebuilding, and believe there is no going back to the past.

Their call comes as a YouGov poll shows that 31% of people want to see big changes in the way the economy is run coming out of the crisis, with a further 28% wanting to see moderate changes and only 6% of people wanting to see no changes.

It also showed 44% of people were pessimistic when they thought about the future of the economy, while only 27% were optimistic. Forty-nine percent thought the crisis had made inequality worse.

Labour peer Lord Kerslake said: “As the country begins to emerge from the crisis, it is becoming clear that people want a better future, not simply to return to where we were before. As with big crises in the past – from wars to the Great Depression – it was universally agreed that there was no going back.

Economists and housing experts are forecasting UK-wide price falls of up to 13%, with “brutal” declines in some areas, as the property market struggles to rebuild during the coronavirus crisis.

The range of forecasts from the major researchers is markedly wider than usual. At one end is the Centre for Economics and Business Research, which predicts that 2020 prices will be down by 13% “as a lack of transactions, high uncertainty and falling incomes take their toll”. But the estate agent Savills said the hit to the market could be more like 5%, and a third of valuation surveyors are predicting that price falls may be limited to 4% or less.

The post-lockdown market will be a buyer’s market, said Jonathan Hopper of Garrington Property Finders, as he forecast falls of 10% nationally and 15% in some areas.

“Areas with a more resilient jobs market should see values hold up better, but elsewhere the price correction could be more brutal,” he said.

The reopening of the housing market will unlock a lot of stalled transactions, said Lucian Cook, Savills’ head of residential research. But he added: “We expect newly agreed deals to take time to rebuild as buyers gradually rebuild confidence. More immediately, things like viewings and mortgage valuations will rely on homeowners being comfortable with measures put in place to protect their safety.” Savills expects short-term price falls of between 5% and 10%.

The author of a groundbreaking report on the economic impact of climate change has called on Rishi Sunak to spend more than £8bn in his first budget next week to kickstart a “massive and long-term” boost to “zero-carbon infrastructure, new skills and sustainable innovation”.

Lord Stern said the new chancellor had a unique opportunity to address regional inequalities and invest to meet the government’s target for net-zero emissions with measures already highlighted in the Conservative party manifesto.

Stern, who runs the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, told Sunak to focus his efforts on sectors that are “difficult to decarbonise”, such as transport, property and industry.

Sunak is known to be hurriedly rewriting his budget speech for 11 March and earmarking funds to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, possibly delaying measures to improve the UK’s infrastructure.

But he is expected to signal extra spending in the regions over the life of the parliament to 2024, to support Britain reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The report recommends the government use £6.3bn committed for energy efficiency in the 2019 election manifesto to reduce energy waste in buildings, which are responsible for 17% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A hardship charity once chaired by Charles Dickens has received a 30% increase in requests for help from struggling shop workers as the high street crisis bites.

The Fashion and Textile Children’s Trust steps in to assist children whose parents work in the fashion industry but are struggling to make ends meet. The surge in requests for its grants in 2019, included a “significant” increase in inquiries from people who were being made redundant from stores.

Anna Pangbourne, the director of the charity, said: “With retailers collapsing, many people have been made redundant, which is very raw for the families involved, particularly at this time of year.”

The charity offers grants to parents who cannot afford essentials for their children. In most cases, families need the cash to buy winter clothing and shoes or to replace broken appliances. It also extends grants to families coping with hardship after a redundancy.

The number of farmers who say market uncertainty has prevented them from investing has increased sharply in the past six months.

Survey figures show that almost a third (31%) of businesses blamed the questionable outlook as the biggest reason for a lack of investment.

The survey of 1,200 farmers carried out in October by YouGov for lenders Hitachi Capital Business Finance (HCBF) and compares with a figure of just 19% citing the same reason in May this year.

The results also revealed that 78% of farmers felt external factors beyond their control hampered the development of their businesses.

HCBF director Gavin Wraith-Carter explained: “We wanted to uncover which issues are proving to be the big obstacles to growth and to see which, if any, are having a bigger impact now in the run-up to Christmas compared to the summertime.

“As expected, the picture is very different. Market uncertainty continues to be a barrier to growth for small business leaders in the agricultural sector, along with volatile cash flow, which is often a reflection of an uncertain market.”

Council workers have been left exposed to the underperformance of Neil Woodford’s stock market-listed fund, with a £10m investment by council pension schemes at risk from the fund’s declining share price.

Shares in the Woodford Patient Capital Trust Fund have tumbled 25% to 58p since 3 June, when Woodford made the shock decision to suspend his flagship Equity Income Fund, following a surge in redemptions sparked by bad market bets.

While the FTSE 250-listed fund is not directly affected by the suspension, the move at its sister fund caused a sell off in shares and the value of shareholder investments to decline.

At least three local authority pension funds, including Derbyshire, West Yorkshire and Dyfed in Wales, have investments tied up in Woodford’s patient capital fund and risk seeing their investments fall further as the stock price continues to slide. Those pensions investments help fund retirement benefits for members including local government employees, councillors, school teachers, charities and housing association staff.

London and the south-east will see more than half of the UK’s future job growth if the government does not address the massive gulf between the capital and everywhere else, an independent inquiry into the UK’s deep–rooted inequalities has warned.

Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service and chair of the UK2070commission on regional inequality, said the UK was going “materially in the wrong direction”. He urged the government to take lessons from Germany in reunifying the country by setting up a £250bn “national renewal fund”.

Londoners as well as people elsewhere will suffer if the imbalance is not addressed, the commission warned, as housing becomes ever more unaffordable and a growing population puts pressure on transport infrastructure, with increasing need for long-distance commuting.

The capital’s taps could also run dry as water supplies come under pressure from the climate crisis. The Environment Agency estimates there will be serious water shortages by 2050, particularly in the south, as the amount of water available is reduced by 10%-15%, with some rivers having 50%-80% less water during summer.

It will also become even more expensive to build in the capital, which is already costly by international standards because of the challenge of engineering through the crowded urban fabric. Despite this, researchers for the 2070 commission estimated that London and the south-east would gain 2.26m extra jobs by 2015, 55% of the UK whole.