London looks good when the sun’s out. But a holiday, or even a day or two at the seaside is an impossible dream for a growing number of young families. A study published today shows that Britain will have 3.5 million children living in poverty by 2020. Another report released today by charities Oxfam, Church Action on Poverty and the Trussell Trust reveals that more than 20 million meals were provided to people in the UK last year – a breathtaking 54% rise on the previous year.
Holiday plans get pushed much further down the list when you’ve got a number of young mouths to feed and no money to do it with. Tonight, the terrible situation faced by growing numbers of youngsters whose parents are struggling to put together the money for their meals will be shown in a Channel 4 documentary called Breadline Kids. It’s on at 7.35pm. One mum on benefits mentioned in the programme has £3.60 a day to spend on herself and her two daughters. This figure seems to tie in with the one given to me by a number of single adults I’ve met at the London food bank. A number of them had been attempting to feed themselves on a budget of £2 a day – or sometimes less.
The accounts of the children are very touching, but hard to listen to. Since the recession began over 1,000 breakfast clubs have been started for primary school children. The problem of children arriving at school hungry has been growing significantly over the last two years. When schools are out for six weeks this summer, children will suffer even more, as the hardest-pressed family budgets melt down to nothing.
Ray Woolford runs the We Care advice centre in South-East London, which provides help and support to struggling individuals and families. The centre also sells fresh and long-life food at very low cost to those in need. He is very concerned about what will happen to families with school-aged children this summer. ‘More and more people are saying they are terrified about how they are going to feed their children.’
He’s currently trying to come up with a solution in time for the mass exodus when schools break locally: ‘We’re trying to find kitchens so that we can run breakfasts and lunch clubs. If not, then we will have food parcels for people to take, with milk and cereals. If we can’t get kitchens then we will create summer kitchen packs.’ He’s also considering liaising with local cafes.
In Blackpool, breakfasts are now being offered to all primary school children. Increasingly, local communities will start to become more aware of the scale of the summer destitution on their doorsteps. I’ve just heard of the case of parents with an 11-year-old daughter who’ve all just spent a week sleeping in a London park. These dreadful cases won’t and can’t remain hidden much longer.
David Goddard, who says he was forced to shoplift after JSA was withdrawn. He ended up in prison.Here in the UK, the daily experiences of the increasing numbers of people who’ve had benefits sanctioned or removed aren’t discussed much across the media. Often individuals seem to drop off the public services radar, and no-one appears to be looking out for them. Many become homeless.
There seem to be fewer sources of help available now for the destitute. The number of support workers, social workers, GPs or probation officers with the time and resources to help a client with complex issues appears to be dwindling. The ‘multi-agency approach’ seems like a sick joke now – unless you know differently?
Last night, at the Jerico Road project in Catford, South-East London, I spoke to David Goddard, a 27-year-old who comes from South-West England, but has moved around constantly in the last year. He’d come along to this church-based support project for the regular Wednesday night hot meal – alongside others who’ve ended up at the sharp end of the austerity experiment in London. Quite a few of the 90 or so people attending this week are homeless. David is one of them.
He very honestly laid out what’s happened to him since February 2013, since he lost his job in catering in Gloucester. Before that he had run raves within the alternative scene and had a record label. He has also worked part-time in a nightclub and as a part-time carer. After losing his catering job he spent six weeks with no money while waiting for his Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claim to be processed. During this time he had to borrow money from family to survive. By the end of March/early April 2013 he’d been suspended from JSA for a week by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), for apparently missing an interview. He then says he got a letter through saying his JSA had been cancelled. He said: ‘I then spent the next month or two seeing if the DWP would give me an interview, filling in applications for a fresh claim online, but not getting any texts or acknowledgements.’
At this stage things took a substantial turn for the worse: ‘I was back taking heroin, and I got made homeless, because I’d moved into a family member’s home, but had to move out because that person said they couldn’t let me continue to live there unless I got benefits. But Gloucester Council wouldn’t pay me housing benefits, because I was living in a family member’s house. Then I started shoplifting. I’m not proud of it, but if you went 24 hours without food you will shoplift. By the end of the summer I was taking enough to survive.’ At this stage, he was also paying for the heroin that way.
He got in touch with the local food bank, but he says they told him they couldn’t help unless he was on employment and support allowance (ESA). He couldn’t find anyone who would give him a voucher to access the food bank. He says he tried the jobcentre and Citizen’s Advice, to no avail.
Between July and Christmas 2013 David was arrested 10 times as he moved around the country, mostly for shoplifting food. Once, when shoplifting for a meal, he was arrested for possession of some quiche and a cheese knife to eat it with. On that occasion he was charged with possession of a blade. The shoplifting happened in various locations. He ended up in court six times, ‘but they did not actually prosecute me’, and the cases were postponed.
He moved to Southall in West London last November while on bail – at which point he says he was ‘off heroin – but shoplifting to survive’. Southall put him in a probation house. But on Boxing Day he was arrested for stealing a microwave dinner from Tesco. At that point, he says ‘they stacked up nine months of shoplifting charges, plus charges for common assault’ – he got in a fight with a security guard and a roadsweeper who tried to stop him stealing the meal – plus criminal damage and theft of a motor vehicle and put him inside for two and a half months from New Year’s Day 2014.
While he was initially in prison in Wormwood Scrubs, he says he then got shunted at very short notice to a host of prisons to attend nearby hearings on the other accumulated charges. During this series of ‘expeditions’, he was shifted to Wandsworth, Bristol, Leicester, and Hewell (near Redditch, Worcestershire) prisons in succession. David was released on March 28, with a travel warrant to get him to London, but without a probation officer. He had a JSA payment of £140 that had hit his account in December from a fresh claim made on November 6th. But this had to last him ‘until my benefits came through, so I was homeless again’.
He headed back to his old shared probation house in Southall: ‘Everything I had was in that house. Eight suitcases of my property and my portfolio on arts, graphics and fashion work that I was planning to take with me to university interviews, and my computer.’ He says that he and a number of his friends were very interested in design, ‘and when I was in prison I spent my time drawing and sketching’. But he couldn’t get access to the house, and couldn’t contact the support workers, because ‘every number had changed’.
Next he submitted a further fresh JSA claim to the DWP in Catford, South-East London on April 14th, and was offered a place at a housing association hostel for the homeless in nearby Lewisham on April 16. He received one JSA payment after that, but says that because he had to attend an interview back at Gloucester Council, ‘I missed a jobcentre interview in Catford, so the DWP cancelled my claim’ He says he spent six weeks at the hostel sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag ‘in one large room with seats and a television, sharing with 25 men and women’.
He believes some of those in the room were aged no more than 16 or 17. It’s very hard to see how treating a group who are vulnerable by nature of being homeless in this way could comply with any safeguarding or duty of care responsibilities. Are these people really safer here in this room than they are on the streets?
David says he was ‘kicked out’ of the hostel when he ‘got into a verbal disagreement’ with another client that then turned into a physical fight. He left last Friday, May 30. He’s now squatting in a unit on an industrial estate that’s being used to store scrap metal. There’s no electricity there.
The dedicated volunteers at the Jerico Road project are going to do what they can to help David. They’ve fixed a meeting with him very soon to talk about his benefits and housing situation. One of the great aspects of this church is its focus on trying to tackle underlying problems such as debt, addiction and homelessness.
David wonders whether his past involvement in the alternative scene and in running raves is counting against him when it comes to looking for a job. He says the past five years have been tough ones for him and his friends from the former scene. ‘Lots of people have been shut down from doing music events, and a lot of my friends have been screwed over. Three of my friends have committed suicide in the last few years.’ He wonders if he’s ‘on a list’.
Maybe David would have ended up on the streets without that initial JSA suspension in Gloucester, but at the very least he was destabilised once that small amount of regular money was withdrawn. According to the latest Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) crime survey released in April, shoplifting is up 6 per cent year on year, while overall crime has fallen significantly. The government is still arguing that there is no link between welfare reforms and the use of food banks. Is it equally convinced that benefits sanctions don’t lead directly to desperate people shoplifting to feed themselves?
Mark Bothwell, who’s on jobseeker’s allowance (JSA). He says he hasn’t been eating properly for years.
Mark Bothwell (above) came into the London food bank today. He’s had a painful problem with his shoulder for some time that leaves him unable to accept many types of physical work, and he also has depression. He’s been waiting for months for his claim for employment and support allowance (ESA) to be processed. Not that this 29-year-old is likely to be better off financially by transferring over from JSA, but he would at least be relieved of some stress. He says: ‘It’s a job-stopping illness, so the positive thing (about changing benefits) is not having to worry about job hunting.’
Last week, he described two recent trips to the accident and emergency (A&E) unit at the local hospital – the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich. He says that terrible chest pain drove him to seek help, and that a viral infection causing inflammation of the outer lining of the heart was suspected. Mark, who is already on strong medication prescribed by his GP for his shoulder pain, had an adverse reaction to one of the medications given at the A&E. It upset his stomach and caused ‘a lot more pain’. This extra pain meant he had to make a second visit to A&E later that week. While the doctors took a family history during his visits to cover heart issues, and did blood tests, an ECG and X rays, he says the doctors didn’t ask about his circumstances. ‘They didn’t ask if I’d been eating properly for the last few months. Actually, I’ve not been eating properly on and off for years. Money has come and gone for years since I moved out of the house at 21. I was homeless for 18 months. Although I’ve had the foodbank vouchers, which has been good – it’s not been enough to cover the last four months. Even during this time (when he’s had some help from food vouchers) there have been a couple of days when I’ve not been able to take my pills because I haven’t had enough food.’ He says that recently, when he hasn’t had enough food, ‘shoplifting has crossed my mind, and this is how desperate people can get’.
Why didn’t the doctors in A&E ask him about his circumstances, which may have flagged up the effect poor nutrition for many years could be having on his health? Could it be because the A&E unit, like many in the NHS in England, is understaffed and generally in crisis? The hospital is part of the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS trust, and this week health inspectors the Care Quality Commission published a report that was highly critical of many aspects of services at the trust, which it says requires improvement. The A &E unit at the Queen Elizabeth is deemed to be inadequate, and ‘not fit for purpose’. The inspectors, who visited the hospital in February, have serious concerns about the safety of A&E services there . They note a shortage of beds for admission to the hospital, causing a block in the system, particularly for patients in A&E. Ambulance personnel told inspectors there were regular delays in booking patients in and patients often had to be treated in the back of ambulances. They also pointed to the low staffing levels in A&E, with 29 full-time equivalent nurse vacancies and vacancies for four consultants and six junior doctors. The report also says that since the closure of the accident department at the nearby Queen Mary’s Hospital in 2012, attendances had risen from around 300 to over 450 a day. Because of a lack of space, patients who ‘would have benefited from being able to lie on a trolley or bed were having their treatment on a chair in full view of other people’. Against this background, do the A&E staff have the time to take detailed enough case histories?
Mark’s food budget of about £2 a day and spells without eating adequately over many years must be impacting on his health, yet none of the doctors treating him in hospital asked him about his nutrition. Is the NHS really capturing the facts about how many people are becoming ill, or having their health conditions made worse because of malnutrition and food poverty? The steep upward trend in the number of people being driven to use food banks indicates a rise in the number of individuals and families struggling to eat well. But as the Faculty of Public Health so clearly points out, actual food bank numbers are ‘an inadequate indicator of need, because many households only ask for emergency food help as a last resort’. So the true scale of food poverty remains hidden.
In Wales, hundreds of patients have been diagnosed with malnutrition in the past few years. New figures from a Freedom of Information Act request show 1,229 patients have been diagnosed since 2007/08. In England, primary and secondary diagnoses of malnutrition in hospitals rose from 3,161 in 2008/09 to 5,499 last year, according to figures released by health minister Norman Lamb. In November 2013 an early-day motion in the House of Commons from MP George Galloway noted a ‘doubling of the diagnoses of primary and secondary malnutrition in Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the years 2010 to 2013 compared to 2008 to 2010’.
Are all cases of malnutrition as a primary or secondary diagnosis being clearly identified, given the levels of understaffing and the workloads in some A&E units? What information is being gathered by GPs? These are issues the All=Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger and Food Poverty may want to start examining closely during its inquiry.
The outlook for Mark this weekend is more positive, and he didn’t need a food voucher this week. His MRI results show a frozen shoulder, and he’ll be referred for physiotherapy by his GP. Mark is relieved that he doesn’t need surgery, and he’s been told he should receive a letter within 10 days telling him when he’ll start receiving ESA payments. He’s finally got an appointment to access group pain management talking therapy, which will take place once a week for 10 weeks. The depression is still there, but is ‘starting to feel a lot better’.
Ann McGauran 