Charities have reported that London’s high cost of living is pushing more families into relying on baby banks.
Baby banks are charities which supply vital items like clothes, nappies and formula to parents who are unable to afford them.
Thea Jaffe, a mother who turned to baby banks during two of her pregnancies, said ‘it literally felt like they were saving my life’.
The statistics on baby bank usage are stark.
The Baby Bank Alliance, which advocates for the charities in the UK, says two-thirds of the baby banks they represent receive referrals they cannot fulfil, due to a lack of resources to meet the high demand.
Children’s charity Action for Children report that 300,000 families in the UK live in poverty despite all parents being in work, with 18% of these families living in London.
Of those working families in poverty, 40% have three children or more, and this figure has risen since the introduction of the controversial two child benefit cap.
Jaffe was being paid £43,000 per year in 2022, working full time in client solutions for a global company, an industry she has been in for seventeen years.
While pregnant with her second child, she took a £10k pay rise, then discovered that she had not been working for long enough in her new role to qualify for statutory maternity pay.
As a single parent with an older child her wage was vital so, whilst on unpaid maternity leave, she started selling books that she found at the side of the road to get by.
“The financial side of things was very difficult and it actually seemed to be getting worse as my pregnancy progressed,” she told the Londoners.
There is evidence that important baby products have been disproportionately affected by inflation in the last few years.
The cost of formula increased by an average of 24% in 2023, according to data from the public health nutrition charity First Steps Nutrition Trust.
Other necessary items like nappies and baby wipes rose in cost by up to 60% and 36% respectively in 2022 according to research by The Grocer magazine.
Jaffe was referred to Little Village baby bank for support and the charity sent vital items including clothes and a high chair directly to her door.
Little Village runs the largest network of baby banks across London.
The charity creates bundles of high quality essential goods from the supplies people donate them and parcel these out to families in need at no cost.
Jaffe ended up returning to Little Village for support less than two years later.
In 2024 Jaffe was living in a one bedroom apartment with her two children when she found out she was pregnant again.
By now her pay had risen to £45,000 per year, but she still could not make ends meet.
Jaffe said when she was at that point ‘I really thought that it was my fault’.
In order to work full time, Jaffe was forced to put her infant children in full time childcare, something she calls ‘the biggest problem for working parents’.
Jaffe said: “All the parents are experiencing the same thing, we’re seeing it eat up our entire pay check.”
The average cost of nursery care in 2025 is £316.33 per week in inner London, according to the Coram children charity’s Childcare Survey.
This is even after the government’s working parent entitlement for 30 hours a week of free childcare is deducted.
Jaffe said: “This isn’t a systemic problem anymore, it’s a crisis – pretty soon we won’t be able to work.”
Fertility rates in England and Wales hit 1.42 births per woman in 2024, the lowest value on record for the third year running and well below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain population levels.
Jaffe is now petitioning for the government to provide more support to working parents, including removing the two child benefit cap.
She said current government provision ‘places the blame for poverty on parents when parents are actually the victims of poverty’.
Despite receiving support from charities and her local community, Jaffe claims her current situation in 2025 remains dire.
She said ongoing costs of childcare and rent have left her in a position where she has ‘never experienced this level of financial stress in my life’.
Yosr Bahr-Al-Ulum has been volunteering and working shifts at Little Village since March this year.
The charity supported 7,325 children last year across 32 of London’s 33 boroughs.
They operate on a referral-only basis, with families referred by midwives, GPs and other professionals who support children.
Bahr-Al-Ulum said the charity has noticed a marked increase in the number of working people who are seeking their services.
She said: “When I look at the referrals I see a lot of people who are on low or uncertain wages and so a lot of people are employed.”
For Bahr-Al-Ulum the cost of living provides a clear explanation for this rise, saying that even when they are working ‘people can’t make ends meet and they end up relying on the service’.
According to her, many families often delay seeking help out of embarrassment, something she describes as ‘charity stigma’.
However, she is proud of the huge impact the charity has on the parents they do reach.
She said: “You just see that the stress and the weight lifts off their shoulders.”
Rachel Walters works at End Child Poverty, a UK charity campaigning to end child poverty, as their coalition manager.
Her experience concurred with volunteers at Little Village as she had also seen a rise in working parents relying on charity services.
She said: “We hear so often about families who cannot even afford the basics even when they’re working.
“The cost of having children is incredibly expensive and if you’re being paid minimum wage it is almost impossible to meet those costs.”
Like Bahr-Al-Ulum, Walters says reaching out to charities is often the last step that families take.
She said the uptick in baby bank usage is therefore ‘also a really bad sign about the level of desperation people are facing’.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill who has worked with Little Village running donation drives and campaigning.
She said: “I am very thankful for their vital work and often blown away by the generosity of our community.”
Despite this, Ribeiro-Addy conceded that ‘it is simply heartbreaking that more and more families have to turn to charity for basic supplies like nappies and formula.’
She said: “The government definitely has a responsibility to address the poverty, inequality and lack of social security that is driving this.”
Ribeiro-Addy blamed families’ financial hardship on Tory policies like the two child benefit cap and axing Sure Start centres.
She added she ‘hopes we will see clear and decisive action on this in the Autumn Budget,’ including scrapping the two-child benefit cap, which she calls the ‘single most effective intervention we can make’.
The government will deliver the budget on 26 November and has pledged to finalise their Child Poverty Strategy this autumn.
In response to this investigation, a Government spokesperson said: “Every child, no matter their background, deserves the best start in life.
“That’s why our Child Poverty Taskforce will publish an ambitious strategy to tackle the structural and root causes of child poverty.
“We are investing £500million in children’s development through the rollout of Best Start Family Hubs, extending free school meals and ensuring the poorest don’t go hungry in the holidays through a new £1billion crisis support package.”
Featured image credit: Thea Jaffe
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