Now Britain needs clothes banks too. What sort of society are we living in? | Frances Ryan

Children are truanting because they don't have school uniforms, so entrenched is poverty. But clothing's a need people don't like to talk about, says Louise Cooke

Louise Cooke, a 46-year-old ex-teacher and community worker in Nottingham, has never been elected nor is her work funded by the taxpayer - but she is filling in the gaps left by the government.

For the past two years, volunteering out the back of her local church, Cooke has been running Sharewear - what, in austerity's language, we could dub a "clothes bank". This isn't packets of pasta or boxes of veg but winter coats and children's shoes. Cooke describes the people who come through the doors as in "crisis": anyone from job seekers to Syrian refugees, from low-paid workers to people on benefits ("We have people coming in on disabled people's behalf because they're housebound," she adds).

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It's like we're living in the developing world - but it's the UK

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