British Food Banks Fed 1,000,000 People In 2014

Food banks barely existed when the current government came to power in 2010, but this year they have fed a million people for free. “People would have died if we had not been there,” says Chris Mould, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, the biggest provider of food banks in Britain. “People say to me, ‘You saved my life.’ They are not joking.” Now the food bank movement has suddenly become a political force in the land, after the publication of a major report by an all-party group of MPs, peers, activists and church leaders calling for action to stop the “evil” of hunger that stalks the UK.

Feeding Britain demands a reform of the welfare system, an end to food waste and a national network of centres able to give the right help and advice. The prime minister has promised to look carefully at the report, and well he might: at least four million people have either given food or worked as volunteers in food banks in the last year, a level of engagement politicians of all kinds can only envy. They certainly can’t ignore it.

“We are a movement of ordinary people who are tired of dry argument in Westminster, because they know that, on the ground, people are going hungry,” says Mould. “This is a movement to be reckoned with. A community that cares.”

Feeding Britain was partly financed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. His Church of England is challenging government in a way it has not done since the 1980s, highlighting the gulf between rich and poor. 

So what is going on here? Why has the nation that invented the welfare state now fallen back on Victorian-style philanthropy? Even rickets, malnutrition and other long-lost maladies have risen up from the grave like the Ghosts of Christmas Past. GPs in Birmingham, London and Manchester began to report the return of the childhood bone-softening disease during the worst of the recession. The number of hospital patients with rickets or vitamin D deficiency has trebled since 2009 to 4,638 in the last year, and even that does not give the full picture. “You don’t need to be admitted to hospital for rickets, but there have been community surveys that have shown it to be increasing, so we should be concerned about that. We should regard these as markers of something not right in the nation’s diet.”

Both conditions can be caused by lack of sunlight as well as a poor diet. Newsweek has learned that 747 of the 881 patients admitted to hospital in England with rickets last year were under five years old.

“People are making serious choices about whether to feed the meter or feed their family,” says Middleton. Here lies the root cause of the crisis that has driven people to food banks, according to Feeding Britain. Food prices rose by nearly 50% in the decade to 2013. Fuel costs increased 153%. In the same time, the average rent went up by a third. Wages grew by just 28%. Some people just could not keep up, they lost the ability to cope with a crisis like the loss of a job – or even a small unexpected bill like a new pair of school shoes – and so began to turn to food banks in desperation.

The Trussell Trust started as a small Christian charity in Salisbury, Wiltshire. The first food bank opened in 2000, when a local woman asked an overseas aid worker where she could get help to feed her family. By 2010 it was running 50 of them. Now Trussell has 420 food banks working in a thousand locations across the country. There may be just as many run by other charities, churches, temples, mosques and community groups but nobody is sure. The research has not yet been done, because the rise has been so fast.

One thing we do know, surprisingly, is that many food bank users have jobs. “What has shocked people is the number of men and women on minimum wage levels who are hungry,” says Frank Field, the Labour MP who is a driving force behind Feeding Britain. Feeding Britain also says the benefit system is cruelly inefficient at times and “punitive” in the way it sanctions people – or withdraws their payments temporarily – for mistakes like missing an appointment or filling in a form incorrectly. “There are a lot of people living on a financial knife edge where small changes in their income hit hard,” says Mould. “You delay somebody’s benefits by a couple of weeks, they have nowhere to turn.”