LONDON (Dispatches) --
Record numbers of food parcels were given out by the Trussell Trust in the past 12 months, as the UK cost of living crisis helped drive more than 750,000 people to food banks for the first time.
The charity’s network distributed nearly three million food parcels in 2022-23, its highest ever total and a year-on-year increase of 37%. More than a million children were living in households receiving the trust’s food parcels.
One in five people using a Trussell food bank over the period were in work, the charity said, reflecting the difficulties many low-income households have in affording everyday essentials amid soaring energy bills and food prices.
Trussell’s chief executive, Emma Revie, said the demand for food parcels last year was higher than it had been during the first year of the Covid pandemic, “which we had all assumed was a once-in-a-lifetime level of need”.
The number of Trussell Trust food parcels distributed had grown by 120% over the past five years, Revie said. In 2017-18 it gave out 1.4 million parcels, at the time a record. The figure increased in four of the following five years before hitting its current peak.
The scale of demand has forced the trust to “think through the logistics” of charity food distribution. Levels of food donations – traditionally from individuals and local charity food drives – have failed to keep pace.
Food bank use soared across all regions of the UK, with the biggest annual increase in food parcel distribution – 54% – seen in the north-east of England. No region or nation of the UK saw less than a 28% rise in food parcel numbers given out.
“We are experiencing an unprecedented rise in the number of people coming to the food bank, particularly employed people who are no longer able to balance a low income against rising living costs,” said Brian Thomas, the chief executive of Trussell’s South Tyneside food bank.
Until relatively recently, the bulk
of people using food banks were in effect destitute, but static incomes and rising prices have changed that profile. People in low-paid and insecure jobs, typically in retail, social care, hospitality and warehousing, are increasingly reliant on charity food, food banks say.
“The Trussell Trust figures represent the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to wider food insecurity,” Sabine Goodwin, Coordinator of the Independent Food Aid Network, said in an email. “The UK’s poverty crisis is having a devastating impact on people’s physical and mental health to the detriment of society as a whole. This is an avoidable public health disaster.”
The trust does not operate in about a quarter of UK local authority areas, and thousands of food banks and food aid charities exist outside its network. Food banks as a whole do not capture the full extent of hunger, with government figures suggesting just 14% of people in severe food insecurity visit food banks.
The Bank of England’s chief economist is facing backlash for suggesting households “need to accept” they will be poorer.
Huw Pill said workers asking for higher pay and shopkeepers putting up prices were “self-defeating” as both fuel inflation.
He urged people to “stop trying” to keep up with the spiraling cost of living and “accept they are worse off”.
But Labour MP Richard Burgon told The Independent that families “should not just have to accept getting poorer” and said Pill’s comments would “stick in people’s throats”.
And the left-wing think tank the New Economics Foundation said Pill’s comments reflected the bank’s “failed inflation strategy”. Its researcher Dominic Caddick said large firms “profiteering” were to blame for high inflation, not workers.
Speaking to a podcast by Columbia Law School, on Tuesday, Pill said: “Somehow, in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power.
“What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share.”
Reacting to his comments, Burgon told The Independent: “Our constituents shouldn’t have to just accept getting poorer and poorer and very rich people telling them to do so will really stick in people’s throats.
“Corporate profits are up, billionaires have never had it so good and top bosses are raking in more than ever. It’s about time they were told to tighten their belts rather than ordinary people being told to just suck up the biggest fall in living standards since records began.”