A Paisley charity leader has said she is “sick of cleaning up after Westminster” as the number of people relying on the third sector for support creeps back towards pre-pandemic levels.
Star Project manager Heather Kay has hit out at the UK Parliament for its lack of sympathy for people during the cost-of-living crisis.
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The Star Project is a Paisley charity that takes a unique approach to looking after people by teaching them skills to help find a way out of hard times.
The charity set up an initiative called Pantry Plus in 2019, which looks at tackling food insecurities.
Heather feels that after the stress of the pandemic, the number of people relying on the charities services is slowly heading towards pandemic levels. She says at the height of covid her team was “running to catch ourselves” trying to provide a decent level of care for everyone.
“Our numbers are pretty, shockingly, high. I would say that we are steadily growing to the level that we were during the pandemic and we were the first community fridge to start in 2019, delivering out to the community.
“Before any the other ones started, we were running to catch ourselves and we never thought we would ever see those numbers again, however, each week on week it is increasing and more people are having to make that choice of eating or paying bills.
”Yet again, people are going an excessive amount of days not eating so they can feed their children. This was something we saw during the pandemic and now we are seeing it again.”
The initiative was set up to help ease the pressure on people on benefits to allow them to make ends meet as they were the “prominent” category that relied in food banks.
However, due to the cos- of-living crisis the country is experiencing, Heather has said that she has noticed a change in dynamic and people who work full-time are now relying on the food bank.
The change in shopping habits and the cost of food has caused problems such as food waste to rise. The Star Project manager has said that although food waste since the pandemic is getting worse, they as a charity, benefit from it as they can help people have food that is still “fresh.”
“I’d say that, as a charity, we do benefit from food waste as the food people want to throw away can be frozen and preserved for others, as the community fridge was designed to tackle food waste.
“I would say that it is a noticeable rise as we are dealing with much much higher volumes of food, as supposed to when we started.”
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