Sunday 16th December 2013
Special report By Julie McDowall
Behind cold metal gates stands Blawarthill Parish
Church in Glasgow.
It’s a modern building, painted
white but grimy with rain.
Two sticks of wood are nailed to the wall
forming a spindly cross which looks as though it could break loose with the next
gust of wind.
Inside the Scotstoun church is a tiny room:
the Glasgow North West Food Bank.
The light is flicked on and chaos is
revealed: bags of sugar stacked by the window; blue crates overflowing with
tins; rickety shelves packed with boxes. It looks like the closing-down sale at
a budget supermarket.
Soon the room fills with volunteers. They
sort the donated food from the blue crates, checking the expiry date and making
sure the food isn’t perishable, then it is categorised and placed on the
shelves.
The volunteers endeavour to make sure each
parcel has variety – there could be a jar of coffee, tins of soup, some
long-life fruit juice, a packet of pasta, some tinned veg, biscuits. They’ll
even provide toothpaste and shampoo if needed.
The “clients” start to arrive.
They have been referred here by doctors,
social workers and charities. Space is cleared at a table and a volunteer
assesses each person, giving them enough food to last three days. When the
formalities are over, they are invited to pop down the corridor to the food
bank’s café for free toasties and hot drinks.
By now the room is cramped. Volunteers are
stepping around one another, crates are being sorted, bags are being packed and
a woman is asking if anyone wants tea.
This Scotstoun food bank is open only twice
a week, for two hours at a time, so everyone has to be dealt with in that short
window, yet there is no stress or temper in this warm room, only frantic
activity.
Lorraine is one of the volunteers, and a
former client of the food bank.
She says:
“I was stuck. I wasn’t getting any money and had the housing on my back because the rent wasn’t getting paid.“I asked for a hardship payment but they’d only give me that if I was homeless, so I was asked to put myself out on the street.”
Lorraine used the food bank when she had
cancer. She entered remission, but then tumours were found in her right
kidney.
The doctor declared her unfit for
work, but the Benefits Agency over-ruled this and her claim for Employment
Support Allowance (ESA) was rejected.
She found work as a cleaner but had to
quit.
Her subsequent claim for
Jobseeker’s Allowance was denied as adjudicators said she was clearly unfit for
work and so must claim ESA – but her ESA application had already been turned
down.
Welcome to austerity in Scotland, Christmas
2013. Kafka could have invented this world.
Shunted from pillar to post, ill and
penniless, Lorraine was left with nothing.
“Basically, they kept on giving me the run-around, and I had to wait eight weeks for benefits, during which I was left starving.”
She sought other help, including the
Community Care Grant, but benefits agency staff said she couldn’t get such
payments unless she was already receiving other welfare help. More shades of
Kafka.
By now, Lorraine had also been
diagnosed with heart arrhythmia, high blood pressure, depression and her kidney
was inflamed. Add starvation to that mix.
In desperation, she applied for a hardship
payment but was refused. Staff told her they only assisted those of “no fixed
abode”.
Their advice?
Declare yourself
homeless.
Lorraine refused to give in.
She says:
“I fought and fought and fought so they sent me to get re-assessed. The doctor took one look at me and said she wanted an ambulance because of the state of my legs.”
By now, Lorraine’s dangerously high blood
pressure had turned the backs of her legs scarlet and swollen.
She declined the offer of an ambulance as
she had borrowed money to buy an all-day bus ticket into the city.
“I’m not going to waste it,”
she told the doctor, and took herself to
hospital on the bus.
The doctor also referred Lorraine to the
food bank while she waited for a decision on her benefits. It was, quite
literally, the only source of help – they welcomed her, fed her, and assisted
her with the paperwork to make her benefit claims.
Lorraine finally received the ESA she was
due and her cancer is in remission. Feeling stronger, she volunteers at the food
bank and will be there on Christmas Day organising a festive dinner for others
in need.
She says:
“I’ll feel rotten if I’m at home and there’s people who might not even have a packet of noodles.”
Angela will be one of those having
Christmas dinner at the food bank. She has been declared unfit to work due to
severe anxiety.
“I could only hold down jobs for a couple of weeks,”
she says, and adds that now she has trouble
leaving the house.
She has been pushed into near starvation,
she says, by the “bedroom tax” – where a claimant’s benefit is cut if they live
in council or housing association accommodation and the state feels they have a
spare room in their home.
The subsequent drop in her benefits has
pushed Angela into rent arrears and she is struggling to find money for food.
“I’ve got the bedroom tax plus rent arrears and I just can’t cope,”
she says.
“How do they expect folk to survive?”
The bedroom tax and paying her rent arrears
means Angela’s weekly income has been cut to £62.50 – below the £71.70 which the
Government say is the minimum a single person needs to live on.
She is reluctant to use her heating so
carries her duvet through the flat with her.
“Then there’s the cat,”
she smiles,
“he snuggles in.”
This gives her added warmth.
The bedroom tax has hit her hard and she
would gladly move to a one-bedroom flat – the only problem is that, even if one
were lying empty next door to her, she would be forbidden from taking it as the
council will not permit a house move when rent arrears exist.
The bedroom tax has pushed her into arrears
and the very same bedroom tax prevents her from moving.
“There’s no logic to it,”
she says.
Once again the spirit of Kafka looms large
in the system.
So with just a small amount of cash left
over each week, Angela is forced to use the food bank.
Having been declared unfit for work, her
benefits eventually will rise to £112.45 per week – but there is a 13-week
waiting period before the money will increase. Until then, the food bank will
keep her going.
The use of food banks has increased
massively since the Coalition came into power and began its welfare reforms. The
Trussell Trust, a Christian charity which helps local communities start up food
banks, issued food to 26,000 people in 2008-09 – this year the number was
346,992. In the last 12 months, food bank use has risen by 170%, and 36.3% of
those helped were children.
There is scant hope that food bank use will
decline.
Welfare Minister Lord Freud has urged
councils to invest money in food banks, saying it is:
“absolutely appropriate”
that people use them.
No wonder opponents of austerity measures
say the idea that the welfare state will care for the needy is gradually eroding
under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat administration, with the Government
simply assuming that good-hearted local people will step in to provide rations
for the desperate.
Gill McCormick helps run the Glasgow North
West Food Bank. She is endlessly calm and cheerful – but when asked about the
Government’s attitude towards food bank users, her face darkens.
She says:
“I don’t know where all this negativity has come from. They make it seem as though it’s something to ashamed of, but there’s a load of people out there who are unable to work and are left feeling like utter failures.”
She has little optimism for the immediate
future and says people gather in the food bank café and tell her they want to
die. The Forget Me Not Café is a vital place, providing a safe haven and
community space for the clients.
“An agency will phone and say, ‘We have someone here who hasn’t eaten for five days. Can we send them along?’”
says McCormick, and that was the trigger
for setting up the café: it is a support network for the clients, but also a
practical way to ensure they can feed someone immediately, before having to go
through the paperwork.
Discussing the food bank clients, she sees
no resemblance to the stereotypical “scroungers”.
Instead, she sees a mother who cared for
her disabled son before being told she must get a job and that carers would be
sent in her place. The lady complied and her carer’s allowance was stopped
immediately – but she still had to wait a month for her wages to come through,
so had to use the food bank to feed herself and her disabled son.
There is a man recovering from surgery who
stayed with his mother to recuperate, meaning he wasn’t at home to collect
letters summoning him to the Benefits Agency.
As he missed the appointment, his money was
halted as punishment.
Nowhere does McCormick see worthless people
who have brought this on themselves.
Her mobile phone rings. It is the Jobcentre
in Balloch asking if they can send someone down. They have a woman who has a
blood clot on the brain and can’t work. Until her benefit money comes through,
she’ll have nothing.
McCormick spends a lot of time on her
phone, speaking to utility companies. Many food bank clients have either had
their power disconnected or are on the verge of being cut off. She phones the
firms to ask for leniency.
“But most of the time they won’t even entertain us,”
she says.
For families without electricity, or those
who cannot afford to run the cooker, the food bank volunteers create special
food parcels made up of cereals, Pot Noodles, biscuits and powdered soups –
foods which can be eaten cold or prepared with a kettle.
Yes, she says, children are being
brought up on this diet.
A dusty, yellow crate sits by the door,
with a skateboard, some books and a stuffed lion inside. They are collecting
toys for the children who will be having Christmas dinner at the food bank.
McCormick says they will have tinsel and get some sweets and put music on. They
are expecting about 100 people.
She smiles, saying she pictures it as
The Muppet Christmas Carol.
“It’ll be like when Scrooge turns good and everyone in the community comes together.”
Then she gestures to that dusty, yellow
crate:
“But
we need a bit more.”
