An hour after the Hope Centre food bank opens up for the Tuesday afternoon distribution session, a volunteer apologetically tapes an A4 sheet to the glass doors, announcing “Sorry, No Food.” Plastic bags full of tinned food and supermarket donations of produce approaching its sell-by date are being distributed to feed 79 people and there is very little left on the shelves in a storeroom of this church in Coventry, England.
“We’ve been back to the warehouse, but we’re still struggling,” said Karen Sumner, one of the food bank volunteers. “We should be open for two hours, but we usually run out of food after an hour.”
A man arrives in the rain, very distressed to see the “No Food” sign. This afternoon, he has walked 5km from his home to collect a food parcel, arriving just after the session began, but because he had no ID on him, he then had to walk half a kilometer into the center of town to get a letter from a charity certifying that he is who he claims to be, and then half a kilometer back to be issued with some food. His social benefits have been stopped for reasons that are not clear to him, and he faces the prospect of a 5km walk home again, with no food and no money, until volunteers agree to let him join the crowd of 30 people still waiting in the church’s cafe, and promise to find him something to take away.
“There’s nothing at home. If I don’t get this food I’ll end up shoplifting,” he said.
A sign on the wall, written in chalk on a menu blackboard, advises him: “Psalm 25:8: the Lord is good and does what is right.”
Until 18 months ago there were no food banks in Coventry; now there are 11 across the city. There has been a similarly dramatic rise in the food bank phenomenon nationwide. The largest network of food banks in the UK, the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity, has doubled the number of people it feeds over the past year and reports that three new food banks are opening every week.
A large crowd in the Hope Centre is from Romania, and said they were waiting for food because collecting scrap metal and washing cars was not enough to make ends meet. A bigger number was there because of benefit delays and cuts, or simply because they were no longer able to make their low wages stretch out enough.
A local supermarket has delivered a load of stock just about to reach its sell-by date (it does not want to be named, to avoid getting caught up in discussion on the merits of giving food that is about to expire to the hungry) and today it is offloading industrial quantities of iced buns, which several families take home by the dozen.
The boom in the UK’s food banks reflects a number of worrying and complicated trends. As well as rising unemployment, more people are seeing their hours cut at work. For the past couple of years, charities have been warning that a shift to a less generous way of uprating benefits in line with inflation, combined with rising food and fuel prices, would make life more difficult for people claiming benefits. Then there is the start of a new, harsher benefits regime, as a result of which it seems that more claimants are having their payments sanctioned — cut or stopped entirely — if they miss appointments. At the same time, the state system of a social fund and crisis loans is being wound down, so emergency cash payments from the welfare system for those deemed to be in extreme need are now exceptionally difficult to procure. About 43 percent of visitors to Trussell Trust distribution centers nationwide come because of changes to their benefits or a crisis loan being refused.
British Prime Minister David Cameron recently said he “welcomed” the work done by food banks and, for many in his party, their growing presence is a happy embodiment of the concept of the “big society.” In a debate on food poverty earlier this year, British Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman described them as an “excellent example” of this in action.
For others, the growth is a reflection of a new approach to providing assistance to people in real need. Whereas previously, this was a service that the state would have provided (through crisis loans and benefit payments), now feeding large numbers of people who are not able to feed themselves is being subcontracted to charities.
Once these services move beyond the realms of state provision, there are potential problems — they lose neutrality, a degree of uncertainty comes with initiatives that are volunteer-run, the food on offer is (despite the best efforts of the Trussell Trust) idiosyncratic and the religious environment in which food is provided raises questions for some recipients. It becomes charity rather than basic state support and for many this brings a degree of unease.
British Shadow Minister for Employment Stephen Timms says it is a “pretty worrying reflection of what’s going on in the country, when people are dependent on these charitable hand-outs. My worry is that we are really just at the start of cutting back the benefits system and already a large number of people are not able to buy food for their families. This shouldn’t be happening on the scale that it is now happening.”
Manchester Labour MP, and former head of the Child Poverty Action Group, Kate Green described the growth of food banks as a disgrace.
“I feel a real burning anger about them,” she said. “People are very distressed at having to ask for food; it’s humiliating and distressing.”
At an earlier distribution session at the Queen’s Road Baptist Church, on the ring road near Coventry Station, Paul and Sarah (not their real names) arrive to see if they can get help feeding their family, and look very worried when the volunteer at the church’s reception scans a printed list, kept updated by a team of volunteers across the city, which indicates that they have already had three food parcels this year and that they cannot have another. Trussell Trust food banks only help people in acute situations, and the organization does not want to encourage people to rely on them, so staff are vigilant about the number of packages they hand out to individuals.
Paul, 33, has not had a job since a car accident three years ago damaged his knee and made it hard for him to stand for long stretches; he has now mostly recovered and is looking to return to warehouse work, although he has not managed to find any, partly, he thinks because of the recession and partly because his experience is now a bit out of date. Late last year, he was put on the government’s new Work Programme, allocated a slot with the provider Sencia.
“They are supposed to be helping me find work; all they are doing is having me come in and look for jobs on the Internet. I could be doing that at home myself. They weren’t sending me on any courses,” he said.
He became rather jaundiced with the system and when his grandmother died in January, he failed to go back.
“I missed a few appointments, so my benefits have been sanctioned until December. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” he said.
He has two consecutive six-month sanction periods; most of that time the family gets a hardship payment of £160 (US$250) a week (a cut of £120 from the £280 they received previously). However, for complicated bureaucratic reasons, this payment has not been made for the past couple of weeks and they have nothing to feed their twin six-year-old sons and their eight-year-old daughter. Sarah is five months pregnant.
Paul does not say much, but comments as they wait for the food bank officials to decide whether they are eligible for a fourth, discretionary package that the sanctions system has been very hard for the family.
“It cripples you. If it wasn’t for the food banks, I don’t know how I’d get it, other than steal it,” he said.
“You feel embarrassed coming here,” he added, as a volunteer came out of the stock room with two plastic bags and a box of food.
They said thank you and hurried away, visibly uncomfortable.
British Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Mary Creagh, who has responsibility for food and was brought up in Coventry, is ambivalent about the rise in food banks.
“There’s something about feeling that you are asking for charity rather than getting something from the state ... it’s humiliating; it involves swallowing your dignity, traveling distances to the centers and walking home with plastic bags,” she said.
Volunteers have a much more straightforward attitude. They say they are simply responding to a rise in demand. Graham Carpenter runs the food bank services at the Queens Road Baptist Church.
Since the recession began, “we were seeing more people knocking on the door, asking for help,” he said. “The jobs that are going around now are half the salary that they were before, or part-time. Coventry used to be a factory town, full of skilled workers, a car factory, a machine town. Now it’s a Tesco [supermarket] town. It’s just a different city.”
In contrast to a soup kitchen, individuals cannot just turn up at a food bank and hope to be given supplies. They have to be formally referred and general practitioners, Jobcentre staff, charities and schools in Coventry issue those they think are in acute need a voucher (printed on red paper so that it cannot be easily photocopied) for food that should provide everyone in the recipient’s family enough to live on for three days.
In the church hall, food has been divided into categories in big green plastic crates, with labels written in black felt tip on chopped up squares of cardboard — SOUP, BEANS, TOMS, VEG, CUSTARD, RICE PUD, RICE, SUGAR, TEA, JAM, CHOC, SAUCES. All the food comes from donations. When stocks are running low, volunteers stand outside supermarkets and ask shoppers to buy specific items — anything from longlife milk to tins of tuna.
Volunteers have realized it is not a good idea to let recipients into the stockroom.
“Then they say: ‘Can I have this or that?’ It isn’t fair to someone who has got nothing to show them £1,000 worth of food, with their eyes lighting up,” volunteer Colin Bunting said.
He and a colleague fill up bags, adhering to a list compiled by the Trussell Trust that is meant to ensure that the hand-outs are nutritionally sensible.
There is an eclectic mix of food, some of it of fairly low quality and cheap. Today, among the array of goods on offer, there is Asda (supermarket) Smart Price chicken-flavor noodles; Tesco Everyday Value chilli con carne; green mung beans in a bag; Sainsbury’s (supermarket) Basics chocolate desert mix; a butterscotch supreme desert powder, packed with diglycerides of fatty acids and tetrasodium diphosphate. Staff have a rule that they will not distribute food they would not eat themselves.
“It is a bit annoying when people are clearing out the cupboards and we get rusty tins, something that went out of date in 2011,” Bunting said. “We try to be sensitive. If people give us cream crackers, we wouldn’t give them out, because it’s insulting if [the recipients] can’t afford to buy cheese to eat with it.”
The Trussell Trust volunteers check what dietary restrictions people have, and then choose meals for each applicant.
“We could give them curry and rice?” Bunting said, examining a red voucher.
“Or we could give them pasta with meatballs?” his colleague asked.
Volunteers say they try not to be critical of the people who come in, but incidental comments show they clearly struggle not to categorize recipients into deserving and undeserving; there is a hint of moralizing that might be less pronounced in a state service. There is some uncharitable speculation about why the food bank is less busy in the morning, which goes along the lines of “these people don’t get up early.”
At the Hope Centre, there is discussion about how deserving the Romanian families are.
“We try not to be judgemental, but if you can’t stand close because of the alcohol fumes, you think if you had a couple of bottles less of whisky, then maybe you’d be able to buy some food,” one of the volunteers said, before catching himself, and adding: “But alcoholism is an addiction. Some people are very grateful and others think it is their right to get food.”
There is no active proselytizing, but the food bank recipients sit in the lobby of the church for about 20 minutes waiting for their bags and church staff say that bringing them into the building gets them “curious” and may indirectly encourage attendance.
Gavin Kibble, who runs all the food banks across the city, says that the act of setting up food banks has given a purpose to the church that has been lacking in recent years.
“The franchise model of the Trussell Trust is very easy to implement,” he said. “The church has lost its relevance and maybe this is a way to find it again.”
He used to work as a managing director of a multinational forklift truck company earning a six-figure salary, but would not give up his new role to return to his previous existence because of the “wow factor” of his current job. This appears, in part, to be a sense that divine assistance is being given to ensure that the warehouse is fully stocked.
“There are a lot of wow moments. Food comes just out of the blue when we are stuck. It comes when we need it most and most of the time it is the right stuff,” he said.
Just as he was worried about the dwindling supplies of sweet treats, manna from heaven arrived in the form of a donation of 999 tins of rice pudding from the Coventry Leofric Lions.
He was less enthusiastic about the surplus of baked beans when he muttered: “So many tins of soup and beans. I could sink Coventry with beans.”
He has been struck by the number of times when food has arrived just when it was needed.
“We believe that there is a provider, God, who looks after the needs of the food bank. We believe that is the case. The wow moments are spiritual. We can’t explain them, so we have to look to something bigger,” he said.
Not everyone shares this confidence that food will be provided by divine forces. Kate Green says she had noticed that many shoppers were unable to take part in a recent campaign by Sainsbury’s to get customers to buy food bank donations with their shopping, saying they could not afford to help.
“Isn’t the idea that we can rely on charity to meet the need bound to be too limited?” she asked during the food bank debate.
Most of the recipients of aid barely notice the religious backdrop to the distribution sessions. Joseph Anderson, 44, is phlegmatic about the whole process.
“The reason I am here? The dole decided I missed an appointment so they suspended my money,” he said.
He missed the appointment because he did not have the £3.60 for the bus fare and did not feel up to the 15km walk to the Jobcentre. He has not worked since 2010 when he lost his parcel delivery job, and is anxious to advertise his willingness to do so through the Guardian, hoping there may be readers ready to employ him. He highlights his skills with computer software, but also stresses that he is happy to take any kind of work.
“I don’t want to be on jobseeker’s [allowance]. I’ll mend computers or do cleaning — anything. It isn’t easy to find work. I’m supposed to turn up smart [to interviews], but that costs money,” he said.
He ran out of food six days ago and thinks at home he is down to four tins of baked beans, one tin of ravioli and four potatoes.
Later he reveals the contents of his cupboard, and laughs: “I overestimated — I only had two tins of baked beans.”
It is the first time his benefits have been sanctioned and the first time he has received a food voucher.
“It’s a good service, but we aren’t exactly a third-world country. We shouldn’t need places like this,” he said.
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