Millions of UK adults have skipped work because they couldn’t afford to buy personal hygiene products, leaving them ashamed to face their colleagues.
A charity has described it as a “hidden crisis.”
According to the BBC:
A report suggests 3.2 million UK adults are affected by so-called hygiene poverty – with 12% saying they have avoided facing colleagues as a result.
Their struggle to buy basic items such as soap and deodorant is having a devastating effect on their daily lives, it says.
Hygiene Bank chief executive Ruth Brock said it was a “hidden crisis”.
“It’s much more widespread than we feared, it’s increasing, and it’s disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable,” she said.
Hygiene Bank works to supply food banks, homeless shelters, schools, and other organisations with items including toothpaste, shampoo, soap, deodorant, nappies, period products and laundry detergent.
The charity began in 2018 after founder Lizzy Hall saw the Ken Loach-directed film I, Daniel Blake, which features a scene where a struggling single mother is caught shoplifting sanitary products.
“I think it just doesn’t occur to people in the same way that fuel and food poverty do,” said Ms Brock.
“But the truth is by the time you’re not switching on your heating or you’re going to a food bank for food essentials, you’ve stopped buying essential hygiene products weeks before.”
The charity says a survey it carried out with nearly 2,200 people, in partnership with polling company YouGov, suggests the numbers impacted by hygiene poverty equated to 6% of all UK adults, rising to 13% from lower-income households and 21% of disabled people.
Those experiencing hygiene poverty were most likely to go without shaving products, laundry detergent, household cleaning items, and deodorant, the survey found.
A quarter of respondents said they had gone without toilet paper or soap or shower gel, while three in ten women did not buy period products.
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