It’s like Groundhog Day. A report into food bank use is published. There are more people now than there were last year, month, week using them. Many people are referred to food banks due to delays and cuts to their benefits. Of the remaining referrals, a significant number are in low-paid, insecure work.
You might be forgiven for thinking that the UK doesn’t have a food bank problem, so absent have they been from the election debates and manifesto launches of the past few weeks. Yet the sharp rise in the number of people going hungry in our country seems to be an indicator that something has gone horribly wrong.
In 2009-10, the Trussel Trust’s food banks helped 41,000 people. This has risen to 1.1 million over the past year. What use is pontificating about numbers when you are one of the million? When it’s not a statistic, but a child crying in the night because they wake up hungry?
It is a problem so big that the main political parties don’t seem to know how to even talk about it, let alone address the issue. Instead, they distract us with staged walkabouts and soundbites, hen parties and hashtags, bread and circuses.
When David Cameron visited a food bank in his affluent constituency he reportedly turned up empty-handed, posed for photographs, and helped himself to a free lunch. Perhaps this is what Lord Freud and Edwina Currie were referring to with their comments about people taking advantage of the service. In fact, this is a luxury afforded only to the prime minister, as everyone else needs a voucher and a referral from a doctor, social services or similar agency.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong. Consider those who don’t have those relationships, or services in their communities; those who don’t get a referral or a voucher because nobody recognises that they need to eat.
No one in government seems prepared to admit that if a person is struggling on a marginal income, and a payment is suddenly stopped or reduced, or a large bill comes out of your bank account – or doesn’t because there’s not enough money in there so you’re hit with a slew of bank charges instead – then something has to give. As the bills pile up, the fridge sits empty.
And yet food bank users are still largely dismissed as feckless, or scroungers, be it by politicians or the commentariat. Most of these people have absolutely no comprehension of how it feels to stand outside a community centre ashamed and humiliated, wondering how you ended up in the position of begging for food from your neighbours.
Nobody who has received this help would deny that it is a good thing. But it’s a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of “social security”.
We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society. It’s an old parable, the wind and the sun competing to remove the coat from the back of the traveller; and one the government fails to grasp. It would be better to incentivise people into work with secure jobs and decent wages, than to try to starve them into submission.
We’ve seen, in rising food bank figures and zero-hours contracts, that a “tough love” approach is actually all tough and no love. What is needed instead is something humane, compassionate, right and just.