A decade ago, Anna Kilpatrick was living what she describes as an “aspirational, middle-class” lifestyle. She lived in a four-bedroom semi with her husband and two children in affluent Forest Row, East Sussex. They had a big garden, a wood-burning stove, a large kitchen and a range cooker.

She and her husband were teachers at an independent school, each had a car and they enjoyed summer holidays in Southwold, Suffolk. “I called myself an organic Stepford Wife. We had a big house and lots of space and I didn’t realise at the time just how extraordinary that was, to have that,” she says.

Today Kilpatrick, aged 49, lives in dramatically different circumstances: home is a two-bedroom flat that she shares with her children aged 14

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