Reblogged
from londonfoodbank:
If it weren’t for the food bank she’d be starving, she tells me. A while
back she went without food for 11 days. Christine (not her real name) says she
eventually collapsed in the home she lives in on her own. “I came to, got up,
and made a cup of coffee.”
Her neighbour’s daughter told her about the food bank, and she went down to
the Jobcentre to get a voucher. This time – only the second time she’s come to a
food bank – she had to borrow the money for the fares and take two buses to get
here. She’s 51, but life has not been kind to her in recent years and she looks
much, much older. She says that four years ago she was “almost killed by an
abusive partner”.
Like many food bank clients who live on their own, her first thought is not
for herself, but for her pets. She has quite a few cats. Luckily we’re able to
find some cat food too. This relieves some of her anxiety.
Christine is a qualified silver service waitress. She says the doctor signed
her off work about 10 years ago because of continuing problems with sciatica and
Irritable Bowel Syndrome. She says that six months ago she was told to attend a
medical screening in Croydon (most probably carried out by occupational health
service providers Atos), and that following this she had been assessed as fit
for work and her income support and disability living allowance were stopped.
Why does she think she was assessed as fit for work? According to Christine, the
person who carried out the screening had said she hadn’t asked to go to the
toilet, and had also answered her mobile phone.
She appealed the decision to stop her benefits, but like many food bank
clients she didn’t have enough cash to attend the appeal hearing and it went
ahead without her.
After approaching the local council, Christine got help with filling out the
forms for employment and support allowance (ESA), and she has now started
receiving this. She says the council did not give her help applying for
Disability Living Allowance. She gets £143.40 a fortnight in ESA. But because
she had such a long gap without benefits, she is on anything but an even keel.
She says she currently has debts of £4,500.
She’s paying off the cost of buying a washing machine from BrightHouse - obviously
paying a lot more than if she had paid cash. But her major challenge is her
electricity bill. Her electricity is provided by npower, and she says they’re
telling her she owes them more than £2,000. She’s currently paying npower £12 a
fortnight to cover arrears/debts, “but the majority of my money is going on
this emergency meter, and if I don’t have enough money for it I just sit in the
dark”.
With her focus on feeding the meter, sometimes Christine isn’t even eating.
“I’ll put my cats first”. She can’t use the freezer, because of the expense of
keeping it running and the risk of losing food if her electricity is cut off.
She’s been told she can’t switch electricity companies until she’s paid off £500
of debt.
Why are we letting private companies manage the most vulnerable? As Jeremy Seabrook illustrates in his new book Pauperland: A Short History of Poverty in Britain, “the
richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon
the least defended”. Anthropologists no longer need to head to the Amazon or
Polynesia to examine a “savage society” when they could just get an airline
ticket to Britain, he points out
