‘Starve and shiver with Sunak’ is the reality for millions. The chancellor can – and must – stop it | Gordon Brown

Join me in asking the government for a fourth budget to halt the biggest rise in family poverty seen in our lifetimes

• This article is an introduction to a new series, the heat or eat diaries: dispatches from the frontline of Britain's cost of living emergency

We are only in mid-June, but the 30 staff at the Kirkcaldy Cottage Family Centre in the community where I grew up are dreading October, and what will happen when family fuel bills start to average an unprecedented 55 a week.

Already volunteers and staff are stocking up on blankets, duvets, sheets and pillows, warm children's clothes, and even sleeping bags and hot-water bottles.

Gordon Brown MP was Labour chancellor from 1997 to 2007 and UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010