Over the last couple of days, Jenny's story has received considerable attention from the public as well as from local and national media. People have been shocked by the idea that someone might be given the wrong advice and have also asked whose role it was to advocate for Jenny in this situation.
Our purpose as a Foodbank is to provide people in crisis with emergency food and to signpost our visitors to agencies that can best deal with the underlying causes of that crisis. Jenny visited our Foodbank to bring her neighbour. A volunteer spoke with her and we referred her to Macmillan Cancer Support. Sadly, Macmillan are seeing Jenny's situation repeated across the country. Click here to see a BBC report regarding delays to benefit payments for terminally ill patients. At the Foodbank, we do not have the expertise to advocate for individual visitors and rely on specialist organisations to fulfil this role.
Whilst scandalous, the scale, pace and nature of current welfare reforms make Jenny's story neither uncommon nor surprising. Approximately half of all people turning up to Foodbanks are doing so as a direct result of having benefit payments delayed, reduced or withdrawn altogether. Figures gathered by the Trussell Trust and by Chester and Ellesmere Port Foodbank show that both locally and nationally, changes to the benefit system are the most common reasons for people using Foodbanks. These include changes to crisis loans eligibility rules, delays in payments, Jobseekers allowance sanctions and sickness benefits reassessments. These changes are well documented. An excellent report published by Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty can be found here.
The growth in the numbers of people we provide with emergency food is a demonstration of the extent to which the 'normal' safety net provided by the state in the form of the welfare state is failing in it's basic duty to ensure that people like Jenny and her neighbour have sufficient income to feed themselves adequately.
We are disappointed that there has been no policy response to increasing food poverty in the UK and we strongly support the Trussell Trusts' call for an official and in depth inquiry into the causes of increasing food poverty and the consequent rise in the usage of Foodbanks.
