While there's no denying that there are people in poverty, the numbers don't necessarily paint the whole picture, for example:
It's important to remember that it's about relative poverty, and the way the numbers are compiled (having less than 60% of the median income) mean that poverty will never be irradicated, unless there are major major shifts in the equality of incomes - eg huge additional taxes or reductions of incomes on middle to high earners, including all those on £50-100k who claim to be 'not that well off really' to increase help to people on below average incomes, below about £30k pa.
You could give just over half the country a million pounds and the rest £400k, and there'd be 50% poverty, because they had less than 60% of the average amount.
After the financial crisis in 2007, the percentage of people in poverty actually went down, because the drop in incomes was greater for middle to high earners than low earners and people on benefits, so the arbitary poverty line fell faster than low income families incomes. Didn't help the people at the bottom of the income scale, or those who were 'no longer in poverty' because they still had the same amount of money, just that the people that were better off than them, didn't have quite so much.
The 'poverty line' for a family of 4 in the UK is 60% of average earnings after housing costs, which translates into something like £400 pw after housing costs, so people around this level are hardly sitting in the dark eating cold beans, which is the sort of picture that 'poverty' paints.
Which is why you need to understand what the actual figures mean, rather than blindly thinking 'poverty has gone up, that's terrible'.