Surge in food banks shows welfare system is in crisis

Over 35,000 people in the UK were fed by the food bank network last month alone. We need a new social settlement that will meet the challenges of 21st Century Britain.

 

  

The rising cost of living and an absence of real wage growth, combined with the Government’s relentless austerity drive, are forcing hundreds of thousands of people onto the breadline. Nowhere is this more evident than the recent surge in food banks – their use has grown to the point that Defra are now launching an enquiry.

When quizzed on the matter late last year, Prime Minister David Cameron thought it appropriate to praise the volunteers responsible and make reference to his now largely discredited idea of a “Big Society”. Ed Milliband’s response, to criticise the Coalition Government’s record to date and their unbending austerity agenda, did not suggest a strong desire to engage with this growing crisis either.

Make no mistake – this is a crisis. Not just a crisis of poverty, or of recession, but a crisis of the welfare system altogether. The figures are startling:

• The largest foodbank charity, the Trussell Trust, reports that there are now over 300 food banks operating in the UK, up from 28 in 2009. In 2011-12 food banks fed 128,687 people nationwide, in 2012-13 the charity anticipates this number to rise to over 230,000.
  
  
  
  (graph from The Trussell Trust’s UK Foodbank report 2012)

• A recent survey report conducted by NetMums found that one in five mums are missing meals so their children can eat. Another survey conducted by the Energy Bill Revolution campaign found one in four mothers are forced to choose between feeding their children and heating their homes.
• A staggering 35,095 people were fed by the food bank network in January 2013 alone.

We now face the very real danger that food banks will become a fixed feature of the UK’s increasingly fragile welfare system. As Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapport on the right to food, puts it:

“Food banks are the safety net of safety nets. It is only when government fails that food banks have to step in”.

Do we want to live in a society where poverty and hunger are entrenched? Do we want a system like that in the US, where 37 million people on low-incomes rely on emergency food assistance each year?

nef has already begun to develop a new economics vision of a welfare system that is able to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. At a time of prolonged recession, 70 years on from the Beveridge report, we must now decide what kind of social settlement we want for future generations.

Jacob Mohun
Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust Fellow

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