Louise Cooke, a 46-year-old ex-teacher and community worker in Nottingham, has never been elected nor is her work funded by the taxpayer – but she is filling in the gaps left by the government.

For the past two years, volunteering out the back of her local church, Cooke has been running Sharewear – what, in austerity’s language, we could dub a “clothes bank”. This isn’t packets of pasta or boxes of veg but winter coats and children’s shoes. Cooke describes the people who come through the doors as in “crisis”: anyone from job seekers to Syrian refugees, from low-paid workers to people on benefits (“We have people coming in on disabled people’s behalf because they’re housebound,” she adds).

As Cooke says: “No one should have to walk around in smelly clothes just because they haven’t got enough money. No child should have to go to school in ripped clothes.”

It says something about how entrenched deprivation now is in this country that a key reason Cooke started the scheme in March 2014 was that her son – then volunteering at one of the city’s latest food banks – told her, among the queues for food parcels, people were coming in and asking about packs of baby clothes.

“Clothing’s a need people don’t like to talk about,” she says. “Food banks are so well-known now – people can say they need three days of food and go. But clothes … there’s still a stigma there.”

I speak to Cooke three days after she’s moved the “bank” into bigger premises – an old library in Bestwood Park, a suburb a few miles north of the city centre. It’s an ongoing battle to keep up with increasing demand. Until last week they’d been using loft space at the church to store clothes, even the vestry. As Cooke puts it, “anywhere we could shove things”.

When Sharewear started it was three rails of clothes run by four volunteers. Now, there’s a team of 20 overseeing a main room for clothes, a separate one for bedding and another for children’s clothes – crammed with shoes, and grey, black, white bits for school uniforms. New things are always needed. “We didn’t do towels but people kept coming in asking for them,” Cooke explains. “It enables them to wash. You can’t get much more intimate than that.”

They’ve doubled opening hours – now 10.30am to 2pm every Friday – but Cooke worries about the need for more. (I first speak to her on a Thursday and an hour before, she has had to turn a family away to ask them to come back the next day.)

It’s like we’re living in the developing world – but it’s the UK

Everyone coming in is referred by an agency: local children’s centres, housing associations, women’s refuges (the number of referral agencies started at a dozen and is now about 70). Someone will talk to a family about truancy and realise the reason a child hasn’t gone to school is because they haven’t got a uniform – and then send them to Cooke. Vouchers have needs scribbled on them in pen: “Smart clothes for a job interview” or “Warm coats for kids”.

In the early days the vast majority of people who came to her for help had been sanctioned by the jobcentre (“People who’d missed a bus and had their benefits taken”). Increasingly now it’s working families struggling on low pay – often on zero-hour contracts. “Both parents are working and still they can’t afford shoes and coats for their children,” Cooke says. “We get people calling saying, ‘I can’t come on Friday because I’m at work. They need the clothes but haven’t got a chance to come for them because they’re working all the time. It’s unbelievable.”

Cooke goes by the motto “we’re all one step away from this happening to us”, and is full of examples to illustrate her point. She tells me about a man she met last summer whose wife had her benefits stopped after being admitted to hospital. He’d had to quit his job because there was no one to look after their children.

“He came in for school uniforms – a pinafore dress and blouse, a shirt for his little boy. And trainers for PE,” she lists. “He was saying to the children, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it. We won’t need to come again.’ I think of him often. Who knows if they’ll get their benefits back? As they left, the little boy – he was only about eight – said to his dad, ‘Don’t forget to pay!’ He thought we were a shop. His dad looked so embarrassed.”

If we needed a symbol of what Britain’s safety net looks like now, Cooke tells me that after Nottingham city council started an intervention programme for families in need, support workers have been coming to the clothes bank to get them bedding, jumpers and shoes.

Last year Cooke shipped spare bags of donated clothes overseas – to disaster-hit areas in Nepal and the migrant camps in Calais – but says they look set to need “every last bit” in Nottingham this year.

Five years ago it would have been inconceivable to think food banks – and the poverty that leads families to them – would be a normalised part of towns and cities up and down this country. Five years from now, will we say the same about clothes banks?

“It’s like we’re living in the developing world – but it’s the UK,” Cooke says. “What sort of society are we living in?”