A Tory MP who claimed poor people use food banks because they cannot “cook or budget” has said he in unrepentant on his comments.
Lee Anderson MP caused outrage with a Commons speech on Wednesday by saying a large portion of food bank users simply need to taught basic skills.
The Ashfield MP defended his claims on Thursday saying that a lot of people would be able to stop using food banks with the “right support and the right education”.
He added: “The point I was trying to make was I think the actual food bank use is exaggerated.”
Anderson said he works with a local food bank in Ashfield and they’ve got a “wonderful initiative” where people receive one food package, but have to sign up to a cooking course along with a budgeting course at the same time.
He suggested the “real nub of the problem” is the “generations of people out there who simply haven’t got the skills to “budget properly”.
On the backlash from his remarks in the Commons, he said: “I’m sort of glad it caused all this fuss because it brings that debate out.”
The MP also claimed that he was able to make 170 meals for £50 by cooking from scratch, using fresh vegetables and meat from the local supermarket while batch cooking.
That drew a scathing comment from food campaigner Jack Monroe who tweeted: “You can’t cook meals from scratch with nothing. You can’t buy cheap food with nothing."
“The issue is not ‘skills’, it’s 12 years of Conservative cuts to social support."
“The square root of f*** all is always going to be f*** all, no matter how creatively you’re told to dice it.”
She added: ““For a party so keen to push personal fiscal responsibility back onto the most vulnerable individuals, the Conservatives are remarkably reticent to take any degree of responsibility for deliberately pushing those people into such difficult desperate situations in the first place.”
Prisons minister Victoria Atkins distanced herself from Anderson’s remarks, insisting it was “not the view of me or anyone else in Government”.
Responding to a suggestion that the comments accused people of using food banks to get a “ready meal” because “they can’t be bothered cooking”,Atkins said: “I’ve spent my ministerial career working with very vulnerable people ... cooking lessons will not be the complete solution to that.”
Food banks provided more than 19 million meals in the year to March as hard-up families across the UK struggling with the mounting cost of living crisis.
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