Alston said the UK government caused "great misery" with "punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous" austerity measures, and roughly 14 million people, one in five of the UK population, experience poverty and 1.5 million are destitute, cannot pay for basic essentials. He cited statistics from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and noted particularly predictions that child poverty could increase by 7% between 2015 and 2022, possibly reaching 40%. He said, "It is patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty," and added that compassion had been given up during nearly a decade of austerity so severe that key parts of the postwar social contract, William Beveridge worked out over 70 years ago, had been lost. Alston visited towns and cities including London, Oxford, Cardiff, Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, then Alston said “obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in food banks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the government to appoint a minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard-of levels of loneliness and isolation”. A government spokesperson stated that average household incomes were at a record high, income inequality had fallen and that universal credit, which Alston attacked as "Orwellian" and "fast falling into universal discredit", was supporting people into work faster.