A West Country council has become the second in England to declare a cost of living emergency.

Mendip District Councillors voted through the motion on Monday evening.

It means the Liberal Democrat-run authority will write to the government asking for more action and organise a conference with support organisations.

Eastbourne in East Sussex became the first council in the country to declare a cost of living emergency earlier in the month.

Mendip is the first district council in the UK to adopt the stance, which is designed to acknowledge and address rural poverty due to rising food and fuel prices.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is under pressure to legally enshrine free access to cash in rural areas, after more than a fifth of ATMs closed in one north-east constituency.

A change in the law was first raised in the March 2020 budget but was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, Conservative MP Andrew Bowie is calling for the Chancellor to push this to the top of the agenda at the state opening of parliament on May 10.

His West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine constituency saw 22% of its free-to-use ATMs close between August 2018 and December 2021.

The proposals would introduce new laws to make sure people only need to travel a “reasonable distance” to pay in or take out cash.

The MP has been contacted by hundreds of constituents calling for the legislation to be introduced as part of the government’s next programme.

It comes after the Banchory branch of Virgin Money closed earlier this year – one of 12 closed across Scotland.

A paper by the Cardiff University geographer Andrew Williams and colleagues offers a reality check, pointing out that austerity did not bypass rural England and Wales. It too has seen big cuts to public infrastructure and services. Rural housing has its own affordability crisis. Poverty, so often imagined solely as an urban affliction, thrives, though often hidden, amid the pretty market towns and rolling green fields.

The disconnectedness of rural living may be part of its charm but it is also a driver of inequality, the paper points out. Almost no one in urban areas lives more than 4km (2.5 miles) from a GP – one in five households in rural areas do. It is the same for supermarkets: 44% of country dwellers have to travel more than 4km to get to one, while 59% are not within 4km of a bank. Public transport has been decimated – if you don’t have a car, good luck.

The closure of Sure Start children centres, jobcentres and youth clubs has exacerbated the access problem. Of 605 libraries closed in England since 2010, 150 were in rural areas. They were more likely to be rescued by volunteers in urban areas, Williams points out, “suggesting that the ‘rural’ is not quite the ‘ideal laboratory’ for community-run public services that it is made out to be by proponents of the big society.”

One way rural local authorities have sought to mitigate the cuts enforced on them by central government is by “switching” services such as public toilets and parks to the care of parish and town councils, who raise local taxes to pay for them. Not a problem for wealthy villagers but hardly fair to those who are less well off, who are in effect taxed twice at a time when their incomes have been shrinking as a result of welfare cuts.

Many rural economies are weak, even in the prettiest, chocolate boxy parts. Low wages and casual labour are rife, and the rural premium on fuel and food is eye-watering. Households in rural hamlets with a car spend an average £139 a week on transport, compared with £79 in urban areas. More than 40% of households in rural Wales live in fuel poverty, says Williams, compared with 22% in urban areas. Similarly, people in isolated rural areas spend an average £71 a week on food, compared with £61 in cities.

A household is considered to be in relative poverty if their income is below 60% of median income of £507 a week in 2017-18, while they are in absolute poverty if their income is below 60% of the 2010-11 median income, adjusted for inflation.

The latest figures show the number of children living in absolute poverty increased by 200,000 in 2017-18. Relative child poverty also increased before housing costs, and fell slightly after housing costs.

As a result, 30% of children, or 4.1 million, were living in relative poverty (after housing costs) in 2017-18 in the UK and 70% of children living in poverty were in working families.

The percentage of pensioners in relative poverty before housing costs rose from 17% to 18% between 2016/17 and 2017/18.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank said the recent increase in child poverty had been primarily driven by the freeze in the value of working-age benefits, made worse by a spike in inflation to 3% in late 2017.

Claimants “drop off a cliff” and “remain in freefall” in rent arrears due to delays in receiving payments under the new Universal Credit regime, MPs have heard.

It comes as the Government plans to accelerate the delayed roll-out of Universal Credit – devised by the former welfare chief Iain Duncan Smith – to 50 new areas in the autumn despite warnings that it is a “disaster waiting to happen”.

Speaking to MPs on the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee in Westminster, council leaders, food banks and charities from across the country raised concerns about the system which intends to merge six existing benefits into one single monthly payment from claimants.

Earlier this week Citizens Advice called for a suspension of the programme, citing major concerns that families risk being pushed into a spiral of debt due to a minimum six-week wait for an initial payment and processing delays.

Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, added: “The roll-out of universal credit is a disaster waiting to happen.

Working age households still have less money than they did before the financial crisis, but retirees have seen their incomes soar, new official figures reveal.

A typical working age household had £28,481 of disposable income in 2016, less than the £28,825 they had in 2007, adjusted for inflation, the Office of National Statistics reported on Tuesday.

Retirees, however, have enjoyed a 17 per cent increase in income since 2007, helped by generous pension spending and rising property values. The “triple lock” guarantee, introduced by the coalition in 2010 ensures the state pension rises by whichever is the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent.

By contrast, workers have seen wages stagnate for almost a decade, accentuating a growing generational divide in the UK.

In November, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that people aged 22 to 30 have seen their incomes fall 7 per cent since 2007, while those aged over 60 have enjoyed an 11 per cent boost.

The gap between the lifespans of rich and poor people in England and Wales is rising for the first time since the 1870s, researchers have suggested.

Everyone is living longer but rich people’s lives are extending faster, the City University London study says.

Better life expectancy narrowed the gap in the early 20th Century but this trend reversed for men in the 1990s.

Author Prof Les Mayhew from Cass Business School said the difference was mainly due to “lifestyle choices”.

Based on figures from the Human Mortality Database, researchers measured the differences in age between the youngest 10% of adult deaths and the oldest 5%.

From 1870 to 1939 the gap steadily closed, the report said.

“Everyone benefited from improvements in clean drinking water, better housing, higher incomes and better health,” said Prof Mayhew.

After 1950 there were further rises in life expectancy – though inequalities in lifespan persisted rather than narrowing further.

But in the 1990s lifespan inequalities actually worsened, particularly for men, for the first time since the late 1870s, say the researchers.

For me who died in 2010 aged over 30 years, the data reveals that while the oldest 5% reached an average age of almost 96, the youngest 10% died at an average age of just over 62 years (more than 33 years younger). By 2009 this longevity gap was 1.7 years greater than it has been at its narrowest in 1993. For women who died aged over 30 years in 2010, the longevity gap between the oldest and youngest cohorts was 31 years.

The authors suggest lack of wealth is not directly responsible for the difference, but the poorest groups are more likely to suffer the cumulative effects of decades of poor lifestyle choices and income inequality – while wealthier, more educated people may find it easier to adopt healthier habits.

The authors say the negative health outcomes of smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, poor diet and lack of exercise “are disproportionately associated with the poorest in society”.

They say it is vital to encourage healthier lifestyles and to counter pressure on individuals from “exposure to advertising, their communities and peer groups”.

A report produced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that soaring prices for food and fuel over the past decade have had a bigger impact on struggling families who spend more of their budgets on staple goods.

By contrast, richer households had been the beneficiaries of the drop in mortgage rates and lower motoring costs.

The study by the IFS for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said the government method for calculating absolute poverty – the number of people living below a breadline that rises each year in line with the cost of living – assumed that all households faced the same inflation rate.

But in the six years from early 2008 to early 2014, the cost of energy had risen by 67% and the cost of food by 32%. Over the same period the retail prices index – a measure of the cost of a basket of goods and services – had gone up by 22%.

The IFS report said the poorest 20% of households spent 8% of their budgets on energy and 20% on food, while the richest 20% spent 4% on energy and 11% on food.

Forget the roses around the cottage door, country living can be a toxic mix of poverty, isolation and ill health. Government-funded research has repeatedly pointed to 20-25% of households in rural England living in or at the margins of poverty.

Professor Mark Shucksmith, a commissioner to the now defunct Commission for Rural Communities, pointed to hidden and “dispersed poverty”, highlighting the fact that there are similar risks of poverty in urban and rural areas.

Another professor – Clare Wenger – established some time ago that older residents are vulnerable on account of not having social support networks to hand. The classic case of this is the couple who retire to a small town and then, if one of them dies, the other is left alone in a new setting.

In other cases, family members are forced to move away as housing becomes unaffordable. In the last year or so, housing supply has collapsed: affordable housing starts fell by 65% in 2011-12.

Furthermore, rural deprivation can be self-reinforcing – an elderly resident may not have much money, which leads to poor housing and upkeep, payment for relatively expensive goods at a local store and cost of maintaining a car because of bad local transport systems. The combination can lead to physical and mental illness.

It’s not just the elderly who face an uncertain future in the countryside. Farmers are increasingly feeling the pain. A 2007 article in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine stated that farmers “are one of the professional groups at highest risk of suicide in England and Wales, and account for about 1% of all suicides”.

What about young people in the countryside? Shucksmith points to suffering due to poor access to transport, a lack of public transport and the high cost of private transport. These are all barriers to finding work.

Careers advice is lacking too, so while schools have a new duty to access independent careers advice, they have no additional funds for this. A low wage, low skill economy dominates rural England. Youth services are disappearing and public services are withdrawn, especially in more remote areas, while voluntary and community provision loses much of its subsidy.

The upshot is hollow words from government: a Defra rural statement in 2012 admits that poverty and deprivation exist in rural areas and that there are crucial economic, geographic and demographic factors relating to distance, population sparsity, ageing, social isolation and market structure, for example, that can have a significant on people’s lives.

The majority of British children will soon be growing up in families which are struggling “below the breadline” because of welfare cuts, tax rises and wage freezes, the Government is warned today.

Within two years, almost 7.1m of the nation’s 13m youngsters will be in homes with incomes judged to be less than the minimum necessary for a decent standard of living, according to a new report.

The figures, which emerged a week ahead of George Osborne’s Budget, suggest that an unwanted legacy of the Coalition’s squeeze on spending will be to leave more children living close to poverty.

They coincide with a new survey for the Resolution Foundation think-tank, which found that almost seven in ten of people believe the Government does not understand the financial strains they face.

The impact on children of the economic downturn and austerity measures was underlined by an analysis that concluded that the number of under-18s living in households below minimum income standards would increase by 690,000 between 2010 and 2015. The definitions of acceptable living standards are drawn up by the respected charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Today’s report said 460,000 children would be pushed below those levels by the increase in VAT and cuts to tax credits, 170,000 by sluggish wage growth and 80,000 by the curbs on public sector pay. Just 20,000 would be raised above the minimum level by the new Universal Credit system, which begins to come into force in October.