Finalist, Thatcher's Children by Craig Easton

Thatcher’s Children investigates the chronic intergenerational nature of poverty, exploring the effects of successive governments’ social policies as experienced by three generations of one family in the north of England. I first met the Williams family in Blackpool in 1992: two parents and six children living in a hostel for homeless families. They were trapped in a cycle of unemployment and poverty. I had long wondered what became of the family; I finally traced them in 2016 and have been working with them ever since. The six children now have almost 30 children between them, almost all living in similar conditions to those in which I found them in 1992. Now, however, they are trapped by zero-hours contracts and ‘in-work poverty’. I see their experience as being illustrative of what happened to a society that was left behind by the social policies implemented in the 1980s and ’90s.