According to children's charity Barnardos, more than one million children in the UK are left in the lurch because their families can't afford the "luxury" of replacing broken frames or moldy bed linen. They are said to be sleeping on the floor or sharing a bed with their parents or siblings.

Charities say the rise in 'bed poverty' reflects rising levels of poverty, with low-income households already struggling with soaring food and petrol prices and often unable to get a good night's sleep. He says he feels it.

The acute distress meant the family had to scramble to find improvised sleeping arrangements, according to a report released on Friday. An estimated 700,000 children shared beds and 440,000 children slept on the floor, leaving children tired, anxious and having difficulty concentrating at school.

Barnardo's research shows that parents and children were often forced to share a bed. Some parents would sleep on sofas or chairs to vacate their bed for their children. Other children would spend the night on mattresses or blankets on the floor, sometimes without sheets or duvets.

Some of the most vivid findings included a three-year-old having to sleep in a baby cot, a 17-year-old sleeping in a seven-year-old`s bed, and a parent sleeping on a child`s single mattress. Many families saw replacing broken beds as an unaffordable “luxury”. With soaring energy bills, even regularly washing bedding was hard.

More than 336,000 families could not afford to replace or repair beds in the last year, Barnardo`s estimates. More than 204,000 families said their children`s bed or bedding was mouldy or damp because putting the heating on was too expensive and more than 187,000 said they couldn`t afford to wash or dry bedding.

“People take it for granted everyone has a bed,” mum of two Shelley Nicholson told the Guardian. Last winter she slept on a sofa in her unheated front room, her daughters sharing a double mattress on the bare concrete floor next to her. For many people in poverty like her, she added, having a bed felt like a privilege.

Nicholson, a part-time charity worker, and her daughters live in a damp and mold-affected housing association site on the outskirts of Carlisle, Cumbria. Two of their beds were broken, but they couldn't afford to heat their bedroom anyway, so they slept in the living room every night for three months starting in December last year.

She tried to make the most of it. There were candles and everyone wanted big, cozy hoodies for Christmas. I just tried to make you as comfortable as possible. ”

There was no way to hide the cold and discomfort. “My back hurts when I sleep on a mattress on the floor,” said my 16-year-old daughter Ash, who was studying for her GCSE mock exams at the time. She "gets little or no sleep, feels cold, and gets to the point where she's had enough."