Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby launched a report yesterday urging Britain’s government to do more to eliminate hunger.
Welby is backing the report by a group of lawmakers that was prompted by a huge increase in the number of Britons using food banks.
The Trussell Trust, one of the main charities running food banks in Britain, said the number of people using its centers has risen from 128,697 in 2011 and 2012 to 913,138 last year and this year.
The All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty in Britain is set to urge the creation of a body featuring government ministers to work for a “hunger-free Britain,” plus action to make supermarkets give surplus food to poor people.
In an article for this week’s Mail on Sunday newspaper, Welby compared what he saw at a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a food bank in Britain where he met a struggling family.
“I found their plight more shocking,” the Anglican Church leader wrote. “It was less serious, but it was here. And they weren’t careless with what they had — they were just up against it.”
The co-chairman of the group behind the report, British lawmaker Frank Field of the Labour Party, said ahead of its publication: “There is clear evidence that something terribly disturbing is happening... People are near the abyss and the smallest thing can tip them over into the abyss.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government, led by the center-right Conservative Party, has imposed steep cuts on public services in Britain since coming to power in 2010 to try to reduce a budget deficit.
Britain’s deficit is forecast to hit ￡91.3 billion (US$142 billion) in the year to March 2015, British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said in a budget update on Wednesday last week.
The next day, Osborne responded to a suggestion in a BBC report that the cuts were taking parts of Britain back to the kind of crippling poverty portrayed in George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier.
He condemned the claim as “hyperbolic,” rejecting the BBC’s allegation that the budget had “glossed over” the “hulking great mountain of pain” facing Britain.
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