Hundreds of people die in poverty in Shropshire every year, according to estimates published for the first time.

End-of-life charity Marie Curie said it was "shocking" that more than 90,000 people across the UK pass away while living in poverty annually and called for urgent action from the Government.

And the findings could be an underestimate as research by Loughborough University on behalf of the charity analysed data from before both the coronavirus pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

The estimates suggest that 406 people in Shropshire died in 2019 having experienced poverty in the last year of their life – around 12% of the total number of deaths in the area.

They were among 8,215 annual deaths in poverty across the West Midlands, and almost 93,000 throughout the whole of the UK.

More than 15% of the nearly 605,000 people who died in the UK in 2019 are estimated to have experienced poverty in the last year before their death.

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Researchers modelled estimates using a combination of data from a survey which closely followed the lives of thousands of people from 2009 to 2019, and local figures on deprivation.

For most of the findings, the Social Metrics Commission's definition of poverty was used which examines how much someone’s resources, after housing costs, meets their needs – including "inescapable costs" such as childcare and disability.

Juliet Stone, from the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, said the cost of living is high and rising, making the physical and financial challenges for people with terminal illnesses even tougher.

She said: "The number of people dying in poverty has almost certainly risen even further since the period covered by our research and will only get higher in the coming months as the cost of living crisis deepens.”

They found that 68,000 (around three-quarters) of the people who died experiencing poverty were of pension age – representing 13% of the more than 500,000 deaths among this group.