Just over a year ago, with the cost of living crisis in full swing and levels of hardship and hunger rocketing in her deprived patch of east London, Denise Bentley shut down the food bank she founded more than a decade ago. “It was a difficult step to take,” she says, “but we realised the food bank was not the answer to the problem.”
At the time, demand for its food parcels was off the scale; food supplies were harder and harder to source; and staff and volunteers were burnt out. Bentley recalls: “The question was: do we spend £100,000 on buying food and stocking the warehouse? Or do we spend the money on transforming people’s lives?”
The closure was not universally popular, especially among local public agencies who had grown used to sending their struggling clients for charity handouts. But 12 years on the frontline had taught Bentley food banks were unsustainable, a fraying sticking plaster. “It was time for change,” she says, “You can’t keep throwing food at poverty.”
The UK has witnessed a massive expansion in charity food over the past decade, a sector that is based on the idea that that the efforts of volunteers, together with thousands of tonnes of free surplus food, could meaningfully address the explosion in hardship and destitution created by years of austerity and cuts to social welfare. Now all that is starting to be questioned: have food banks actually worked?
This week Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest food bank network, signalled perhaps more strongly than ever before the limits of charity food. Emma Revie, the chief executive of the trust, said food banks were not the answer when a wealthy country was experienceing such dismal hardship. “We need a social security system which provides protection and the dignity for people to cover their own essentials, such as food and bills,” she said.
Food banks are themselves struggling. The cost of living crisis has driven record demand and diminished supplies of donated food. Last year, Trussell gave out a record 3m food parcels and spent £7.5m on buying food to give out. The work is ever more stressful and all-consuming, the logistics more elaborate and precarious, the queues longer, the client needs ever more complex and intractable.
The pandemic, followed by the cost of living crisis, brutally exposed the limitations of charity. “During Covid we went through the 100mph barrier in terms of demand,” says Nigel Webster, the manager of Bestwood and Bulwell food bank in Nottingham. “Then the cost of living crisis came along and we went through the sound barrier.”
In 2016, when the Guardian visited, Bestwood and Bulwell kept its stock of food in one shipping container; it now has four. In early June, says Webster, “we fed more people in two hours than we fed in two weeks in 2015”. Food donations now cover just a third of the demand; increasingly they have to raise money to buy in food. “There has been an assumption that there’s a magic food tree but we are all getting a wake-up call,” he says.
Coventry food bank operates a 25,000 sq ft warehouse to distribute food to its local branches and pantries in the city and beyond. Its founder, Gavin Kibble, talks of “group procurement” and “intra-region logistics”. The collapse in donations means the food bank buys pallets of food from supermarkets, and is looking to “move up the supply chain” to bulk-purchase from manufacturers and growers.
Keeping the food bank stocked to cope with demand has become a major task, on a scale unimaginable in 2012, when the Guardian last wrote about it. Back then, Kibble, who like many in the sector is driven by religious faith, said he believed God would always provide for the food bank. Does he still believe that? “He has not let us down in the last 12 years. It continues to amaze me.”
Veteran food bank volunteers, who set up their local charities a decade ago look back wistfully at the optimism that led them to believe the need for charity food would last a couple of years. Instead, as austerity deepened, they expanded: operations that started in church cupboards moved into warehouses with forklift trucks. What were intimate community hubs became, in Webster’s words, “a food conveyor belt”.
Many are conscious of becoming co-opted by the state into the social security system, providing cover for brutal benefit cuts, and normalising low wages. One food bank manager was outraged when a local business came in to have a PR picture taken after donating to the food bank. “I sidled up and whispered: ‘I had three of your staff in for food parcels this week.’”
Daphine Aikens set up London’s first food bank, in Hammersmith and Fulham, in 2010. She quit as its manager in 2021 on medical advice after a stress-related illness brought on by endless 12-hour days. “If I had known in 2010 what it [the food bank] would turn out to be I would never have done it,” she says. “I’m glad I did it. But I would have been horrified by what it has become. I thought the solutions would have been found, the issues would be sorted.”
In 2010, there were 50 Trussell Trust food banks in the UK. Two years later, there were 200; currently there are about 1,400 outlets, plus a further 1,200 independent food banks and uncounted scores of pantries and social supermarkets providing subsidised groceries. Poverty, meanwhile, continues to deepen: benefit rates are at a 40-year low, and inadequate benefit payments do not cover basic living essentials.
Trussell Trust’s latest Hunger in the UK survey published on Wednesday said that in mid-2022, one in seven (14%) of the population, an estimated 11.3 million people, were food-insecure because of a lack of money. Yet only 7% received help, the equivalent of about 5.7 million people. Nearly two-thirds of those going hungry, it said, did not want, did not know about, or could not access charity food.
The “carnage” of Covid and what it revealed about the scale of the UK’s poverty crisis inspired Bentley’s First Love Foundation to develop a food bank exit strategy. Food was expensive; supplies were volatile; the quality variable. It was often highly processed, or culturally inappropriate. Most of all, most clients were not asking for food. “They’d say ‘I’m hungry because I have no money,’” says Bentley.
First Love focused on people’s lack of income. This could be benefit problems, lack of a job, health issues, or inability to access disability benefits. First Love had pioneered advice workers in its food bank. Bentley decided to focus the charity’s energies entirely on the advice: out went the food; in came a service devoted 100% to support and advocacy.
It has about 65 local people on its books at any one time. Its highly trained staff spend time talking with clients, getting to the bottom of their problems and dealing with underlying issues, from domestic violence to alcoholism. They advise clients “for as long as it takes”; it could be two days to fix a simple benefit problem, or two years to stabilise a family in crisis, get them in a position to get a job, and help them thrive.
First Love could spend £6,000 on food parcels to try and keep people afloat, says Bentley, or it could employ two advisers for a month to transform the lives of 50 people. Its advice typically boosts household incomes by £147 a week (£7,600 a year).
“We understand why there has been a growth in food banks but there has to be a better way,” she says. “It’s not about food poverty, it’s about poverty.”
