At a community food table in Staffordshire, produce is being handed out for free.

“I need to come here otherwise we’d be living on bread,” Rebecca Flynn told Sky News.

The 51-year-old said: “I’m earning pretty decent money, but it’s not enough.”

It gives you an insight into just how deeply the cost of living crisis is biting – because Rebecca is working full-time as an office manager for a day service for people with learning difficulties.

On top of that, she has a second job going door-to-door on evenings and weekends, selling cosmetics and homeware.

“There’s nothing more I can do. Unless I win the lottery or get another job. It should be noticed that people are in this state,” she says.

“Local councils, local governments, they need to see what’s going on, come to ground level. It’s 2025. It shouldn’t be like this.”

But it’s not just Rebecca working all hours and needing food handouts to survive.

Alex Chapman is the co-founder of the Norton Canes Community Food Table, and says a third of the people who use it are working full-time.

“It’s mad that you’re working a good job and you think you’d be able to afford everything and go on holiday and everything like that, but in reality they’re struggling to put food on the table,” he says.

“We’re seeing a massive increase in the people that are using the food table. We see them in their work outfits. Professionals, nurses – you don’t expect them to be struggling because they’re working full-time. People who aren’t working – you expect them to be struggling. But it’s across the board.”

The food table is in Cannock Chase.

Sky News analysis of local authorities gives an insight into why people are feeling dissatisfied their salaries are no longer delivering the comfortable lifestyles they thought hard work and a good job would deliver.

Over the past few years, Cannock Chase has gone from being a middle-class part of Britain to one of the lowest-earning areas in the UK.

In 2021, UK average annual salaries were just short of £26,000 – Cannock Chase was almost identical, according to Sky News analysis of Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Since then, the UK average wage has increased by 21.6% – or more than £5,000 a year – keeping pace with high inflation.

But in Cannock Chase, salaries have only risen by 8.4% – meaning on average people are now £300 worse off per month than the average worker across the UK.

Louise Schwartz, who has two children, describes herself as middle-class. After 20 years in the classroom she now has three jobs, working 50 hours a week as a teaching coach, at a software firm and giving private music lessons.

Her husband is an estate agent. They have a mortgage and three cars and together earn around £80,000 a year.

She says the family loves travelling together but can’t afford to go on holiday this year: “It makes me feel sad for my kids, more than anything, that we can’t give them a week away.

“We have food on the table, we’ve got heating, we’ve got cars to drive. But there are definitely some luxuries that we’ve cut back on recently.

“We don’t do expensive supermarkets. We don’t do expensive brands. We do whatever’s on offer for that particular week. My eldest son has started driving, which has then had an impact on my daughter’s horse-riding lessons.”

Louise adds that the family have a hot tub in the garden that they bought years ago, but because of the cost of electricity, they don’t use it.

I ask her: “What does it say that a teacher and an estate agent both working full time can’t afford to go on holiday this year?”

She replies: “I think a lot of people might not be surprised by that because I think people are probably in a similar position but maybe we just don’t talk about it.”

Full-time workers tell us again and again they thought their lifestyles would be more comfortable – that the work ethic would be delivering more than it is.

It seems the dissatisfaction is not only what one person described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, but also the lack of what people refer to as “pleasure money”.

Heidi Boot is what you might call the backbone of the middle classes – running a small business full-time called HB Aesthetics, a salon that does eyebrows, eyelashes and nails.

“I feel like everybody is stretching their appointments. People are working so hard for their money and they’ve got nothing to show for it. They’ve paid all their bills and now they’ve got nothing left to spend on themselves,” she says.

“It shouldn’t be that way. But because I see it all the time I feel like it’s just the normal now.”

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The constituency of Cannock Chase has always voted the way of the country – and at the last election showed significant support for Reform.

The financial woes will worry the government, which insists it’s taking action to give workers more money in their pockets.

But there’s no denying the despairing mood of middle England in the political battlegrounds that brought Labour to power.

A hostile environment era deportation policy for criminals is being expanded by the Labour government as it continues its migration crackdown.

The government wants to go further in extraditing foreign offenders before they have a chance to appeal by including more countries in the existing scheme.

Offenders that have a human right appeal rejected will get offshored, and further appeals will then get heard from abroad.

It follows the government announcing on Saturday that it wants to deport criminals as soon as they are sentenced.

The “deport now, appeal later” policy was first introduced when Baroness Theresa May was home secretary in 2014 as part of the Conservative government’s hostile environment policy to try and reduce migration.

It saw hundreds of people returned to a handful of countries like Kenya and Jamaica under Section 94B of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, added in via amendment.

In 2017, a Supreme Court effectively stopped the policy from being used after it was challenged on the grounds that appealing from abroad was not compliant with human rights.

However, in 2023, then home secretary Suella Braverman announced she was restarting the policy after providing more facilities abroad for people to lodge their appeals.

Now, the current government says it is expanding the partnership from eight countries to 23.

Previously, offenders were being returned to Finland, Nigeria, Estonia, Albania, Belize, Mauritius, Tanzania and Kosovo for remote hearings.

Angola, Australia, Botswana, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Uganda and Zambia are the countries being added – with the government wanting to include more.

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The Home Office claims this is the “the government’s latest tool in its comprehensive approach to scaling up our ability to remove foreign criminals”, touting 5,200 removals of foreign offenders since July 2024 – an increase of 14% compared with the year before.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Those who commit crimes in our country cannot be allowed to manipulate the system, which is why we are restoring control and sending a clear message that our laws must be respected and will be enforced.”

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “We are leading diplomatic efforts to increase the number of countries where foreign criminals can be swiftly returned, and if they want to appeal, they can do so safely from their home country.

“Under this scheme, we’re investing in international partnerships that uphold our security and make our streets safer.”

Both ministers opposed the hostile environment policy when in opposition.

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In 2015, Sir Keir Starmer had questioned whether such a policy was workable – saying in-person appeals were the norm for 200 years and had been a “highly effective way of resolving differences”.

He also raised concerns about the impact on children if parents were deported and then returned after a successful appeal.

In today’s announcement, the prime minister’s administration said it wanted to prevent people from “gaming the system” and clamp down on people staying in the UK for “months or years” while appeals are heard.