For reasons I will go into another day, my three and a bit years of food bank volunteering appear to be coming to an end. I am very much at peace with that given the levels of commitment I have put into it, not to mention the money. It’s a good time, I feel, to reflect on what has changed in the time I have been there and how I see the future of food banks.
The demographic of callers has greatly changed since I started in the autumn of 2023. A considerable number of those needing our food bank would be in work, due, perhaps, to an unforeseen crisis – an unexpected bill or payment that needed to be resolved immediately – or difficulties in getting wages paid on time or even not at all. I haven’t seen any of these people for a fair while now. There are more people needing food bank services who I would describe as broken, mentally or physically and sometimes both. They are often referred to as the ‘underclass’. Damaged people who have missed the safety net or found the safety net wasn’t strong enough.
There has been a large increase in migrants, specifically asylum seekers and refugees, from a variety of places around the world, including particularly Afghanistan, a country that was allowed to collapse and fall back under the rule of the Taliban when the west abandoned the country. They are not, as some might claim, scroungers. They are people who are prevented from working, barred from claiming benefits. Many have come here with nothing. Food banks do not discriminate. Hungry people are hungry people. They need to be fed.
One group of people we never see is the old, state pensioners. I suspect the ‘triple-lock’ of pension increases has propelled the state pension to a level where older folk are less likely to use a food bank. Don’t believe that bollocks about old people being ‘too proud’ to use a food bank. They – we! – are no more ‘proud’ than anyone else They’re better off. And so are working people.
I am not pretending that all jobs these days are well paid. Of course, they aren’t. But the increases in the National Minimum Wage have made a difference. A full-time worker on the minimum wage, which is £12.71 an hour, now earns over £26,000 a year. Again, hardly a fortune, but with benefit top-ups, via Universal Credit, it is less difficult for many people to manage. This is a British success story.
Someone said to me at our food bank that the people we were seeing were, in the main, the unemployable. Perhaps, that’s an exaggeration, but there is some truth in it. I have regularly seen people desperately damaged by alcohol and drugs, as well as people whose lives have been ravaged by all manner of chronic diseases and desperate mental health issues. My experience on the front line is that this is not the complete list of those who use a food bank, but a substantial proportion. Few, if any, are ‘trying it on’. How desperate would you need to be in order to put in a dodgy application for an emergency food parcel if you didn’t really need it? People aren’t making it up for a few tins of economy baked beans. Take me at my word. I was not born yesterday. I have been around poor people for almost all of my working life, I spent the first couple of decades literally being in poverty.
Food banks say that their ambition is to see them closed down. As a mere volunteer, it was certainly mine. But my cynicism has always run deep and I have been questioning whether the food banks’ role has been changing.
Increasingly, and I have to say disappointingly, there is more of a religious aspect to the Trussell Trust, with their ‘Christian ethos’, a need to please God is how I see it. As a card-carrying atheist, bordering on antitheism, my desire to help the most vulnerable people in society comes from within. I hope this doesn’t sound too grand, but it is who and what I am. I do not need to read ancient texts about a supernatural creator in order to have my morals and principles. The last thing I would want to do is to praise a celestial dictator who appears to have allowed millions of people to suffer terribly. He is not welcome in my life. Fortunately, He isn’t really here.
Food banks must avoid the descent into becoming a friend of poverty, rather than a friend of the poor. The lack of political campaigning by the Trussell Trust both nationally and locally concerns me greatly. It is one thing to work hard to alleviate food poverty with a short term fix, like a food bank, it is quite another to address the powers-that-be to ensure they work to end not just food poverty itself, but the conditions that enable damaged, desperate, vulnerable and broken people to use food banks in the first place. It is snugly-jumper comfortable to turn up every week and hand out bags of essentials to those with nothing, just a bit less comfortable to demand change from politicians. Instead of managers posing for smiley photos with visiting MPs, get angry with them. Sticking plaster, which is what food banks are, will never be enough.
I have enjoyed my time with the food bank and I hope you, my loyal reader, have enjoyed reading about my time there. The demographic of callers may have changed, but the fundamental reason food banks exist hasn’t. And that’s food poverty.
Britain overall isn’t broken, but a part of it is and I hope I have described it well enough today. Keep donating, of course, but write to your MP, too. The sticking plaster falls off eventually.
