Prince Charles stood in to deliver a Queen’s Speech immediately condemned for not doing to enough to tackle Britain’s cost of living crisis.

The Queen was absent from the annual State Opening of Parliament for the first time in 59 years, with Buckingham Palace blaming her ongoing mobility issues.

The Prince of Wales instead outlined the government’s plans for 38 new bills over the coming year covering priorities including transport, cutting the NHS’s Covid-related backlog and Britain’s post-Brexit trade prospects.

But critics accused Boris Johnson and his ministers of ‘burying their heads in the sand’ rather than offering enough substantial help to bring down the cost of living, amid soaring inflation and energy bills.

The only nod to the pressures on household incomes in the speech delivered by Charles came in its opening lines: ‘Her Majesty’s government’s priority is to grow and strengthen the economy and help ease the cost of living for families.

‘Her Majesty’s government will level up opportunity in all parts of the country and support more people into work.’

In an introduction to the published Queen’s Speech, the prime minister insisted the government was spending £22 billion to ‘address the cost of living’ and ‘supporting the hardest-hit’.

He added: ‘But we must also remember that for every pound of taxpayer’s money we spend on reducing bills now, it is a pound we are not investing in bringing down bills and prices over the longer term.’

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Save The Children’s UK impact director Dan Paskins said: ‘The cost of living crisis is an emergency the UK government should be dealing with right now.

‘The Queen’s Speech was a major opportunity to support those most affected by rising costs, and the government didn’t take it.   

‘Families we work with are skipping meals, rationing their power and taking on unsustainable levels of debt – but again, instead of taking serious action ministers have buried their heads in the sand.’

Child Poverty Action Group chief executive Alison Garnham said: ‘With 38 bills but no direct help with spiralling costs, this speech was a far cry from what struggling families needed to hear today.

‘Government offered no short-term comfort for parents struggling to feed their kids in the face of rocketing prices, and no long-term vision for ending child poverty.

‘Ministers must respond now to the scale of the current living-costs crisis by committing to an increase in benefits in line with inflation from October.

‘Promises on levelling up and education will go unmet while families don’t have enough money to live on – and abandoning four million children to a life in poverty won’t be much of a legacy either.’

And trade union Unison’s general secretary Christina McAnea accused the government of having ‘run out of ideas’, adding: ‘Ministers haven’t grasped the seriousness of the situation. Families are being forced into debt and are going hungry.

‘Nothing announced today will make a shred of difference to the millions crushed by soaring living costs.’

In response, Downing Street defended not using the Queen’s Speech to introduce measures that would help the cost-of-living crisis in the short term.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said: ‘The public understand that we’ve already acted to address some of the immediate challenges facing the public.

‘The prime minister and the Chancellor are very upfront that no government could address all of these global pressures that we’re seeing.

‘The Queen’s Speech, the Bills we’re bringing forward, focus on boosting economic growth across the country to create the conditions for more people to have high-wage, high-skilled jobs, so dealing with the medium to long-term issues, that’s what is a sustainable solution to ease the burden of families and businesses.

‘It’s an important point to make clear that we always need to strike the right balance. We spent £400 billion during the pandemic, we’ve put £22 billion in to address the immediate cost-of-living pressures and we’re servicing our debt rising to more than £80 billion.

‘It’s an important point for the public to understand that our capacity to inject money is finite and we need to make some key decisions about how we use that funding.’

The bills the speech did promise include establishing a new body Great British Railways to oversee the nation’s railways, a new Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act, extra powers for police to tackle protesters and a ban on so-called ‘no fault’ Section 21 evictions.

The government also plans a UK Infrastructure Bank, a Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill to regenerate towns and cities across England, a Brexit Freedoms Bill aimed at cutting £1 billion-worth of red tape and Channel 4’s sell-off through a new Media Bill.

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