There’s a minor domestic crisis in any family when the fridge-freezer breaks down. Wasted food; no fresh milk; pools of water on the kitchen floor. But for some households, the demise of the washing machine, the tumble dryer or the telly is more than a hiccup – it throws up a major financial challenge.

That’s where firms like BrightHouse come in: pop into one of its 291 stores, and instead of having to find several hundred pounds up front, you can replace a busted appliance for a much more manageable £10-£15 a week.

Except there’s a sting in the tail. When MPs on the all-party parliamentary group on debt and personal finance looked into these “rent-to-own” retailers, of which BrightHouse is the leader, they found that by the time delivery charges, insurance and servicing are loaded on, consumers who can ill afford it end up paying several times over. One fridge-freezer with a five-year service plan, which sells for £644 at middle-class favourite John Lewis, ended up costing £1,716.

They have now asked the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, to investigate. But, like disgraced payday lender Wonga, BrightHouse’s appeal is a sharp reminder of the precariousness of many families’ lives.

Perhaps BrightHouse’s customers should have read the small print. But signing up to a usurious loan deal because of the temptingly low upfront payment is hardly a rare mistake in today’s credit-fuelled economy. Many rent-to-own customers – half of whom receive benefits, and who have on average £19 a week spare for one-off costs – have little or no alternative.

According to Breadline Britain, a salutary new book from poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack, a growing proportion of families are unable to afford the things – such as a working fridge – that most of us would define as essential.

In 2012, their large-scale research project found, one in five children lived in a home that was cold or damp; one in 10 lacked a necessary clothing item, such as a warm winter coat; and one in 20 households couldn’t afford to feed their kids properly. These children’s chances are hobbled long before they reach the school gates – and in many cases their parents are not in the dole queue, but juggling jobs. Many of the adults suffering this kind of “deprivation poverty” – more than half, in fact – are in work. Yet these are the people who have been on the receiving end of a pernicious rhetorical onslaught since 2010. In the Tory lexicon, they are the “troubled families” whose behaviour blights their neighbourhoods: the “skivers”, rather than “strivers”; the people whose blinds are down when their “hardworking” neighbours drag themselves out to work in the morning.

Many rent-to-own customers – who have on average £19 a week spare for one-off costs – have little or no alternative

The new measures underpinned by this narrative – the bedroom tax, the welfare cap for individual families, the benefit sanctions – save minuscule amounts in the context of the £200bn annual welfare budget, but do much to make these people’s lives harder.

As Declan Gaffney points out in the National Institute of Economic and Social Research’s quarterly review, the major savings over the past five years have been made through decisions to raise the state retirement age and limit the uprating of many benefits (and even these cuts have been largely offset by increases in the welfare budget elsewhere). But the rhetoric has been of a crackdown on irresponsibility, fecklessness, idleness; and what Gaffney calls the “cumulative, concentrated impacts of specific measures” on particular individuals can be devastating.

Welfare spending in Britain is not high by historical standards – the recent Welfare Trends report from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which crunched 30 years’ worth of data, found that “the proportion of national income devoted to welfare spending has not shown a significant upward or downward trend over time”. Neither is it high by international standards.

So as economic growth returns and unemployment falls, rather than salami-slicing the benefits bill and ladling out the guilt to the inhabitants of breadline Britain, it is time to reshape the economy to secure for everyone what the majority of people regard as necessary for a decent minimum standard of living.

Ed Miliband’s notion of “predistribution” is a clunky one that he’s unlikely to mention much on the doorstep, but it does gesture at the idea that boosting cash payments to the poor is not the solution.

Tax credits have become more costly because real wages have fallen consistently as workers have won an ever-diminishing share of the proceeds of growth (while their bosses have grown filthy rich). In this context, Labour’s promise to raise the minimum wage closer to the median makes sense. It’s more politically palatable than handing workers back some of the bargaining power that was systematically destroyed in the 80s and 90s, and almost certainly more effective than David Cameron exhorting bosses to give staff a pay rise.

Housing benefit bills have rocketed not because of anyone’s fecklessness, but because of what Martin Wolf in the FT calls “a massive and growing distortion in the market for land”. The bedroom tax is not going to tackle that.

And part of the reason even working households are unable to make ends meet is because of the insecure, low-paid jobs that are far too common at the bottom end of the labour market. Which won’t be solved by docking a few weeks’ jobseeker’s allowance.

“I only tend to eat one meal a day and that does me, ’cos I like to make sure I’ve got enough for my children,” single mum Jennie told the Breadline Britain project. If George Osborne is right that Britain is on track to become the richest major nation in the world by 2030 – or even if he’s not – we should be able to do better by her.