Standing taller…

Alan the food bank manager passes on some heartening news. “Elizabeth”, the Nigerian lady who came in two weeks ago with her baby, returned  to our London food bank on Friday with her children.  The older two were off school because of half term. At first the volunteers weren’t sure it was her.  Alan says she was much brighter, and “standing taller”.

When I interviewed her a fortnight ago, she was very low and so overcome by trauma that she spoke in a whisper. Her husband tried to commit suicide by hanging some weeks earlier. Her eight year old daughter had to fetch a knife to cut the rope.

Alan tells me: “We had a good chat and it seems that social services are now fully involved and are helping her. The kids were sweet and very engaging. It was so good to see her looking so much better, even though hubby is still in hospital and not making much progress. Still we pray….”

This food bank is one of almost 400 set up by the Trussell Trust – which partners with churches and communities to provide a supply of at least three days emergency food to those in a crisis. Alan is the kindest of people and devotes his life to providing practical help to his food bank clients. He also believes in the power of  divine intervention and prayer, as do many of the volunteers who help here in this borough.

I respect Alan’s strong Christian beliefs, which motivate him to do this work.  But  I’m much more of a believer in the power of citizens  to protest at this government’s targeting of  the poorest and most vulnerable. The current direction of welfare and immigration  policies is disturbing – and is turning people like Elizabeth and her family into England’s scapegoats.  A perceptive article in the New Statesman describes the Immigration Bill as an “explicit response” to public perceptions that the benefit system is a “magnet for migrants coming to access more generous benefits that they would receive at home, even though there is very little hard evidence of this…” This Bill, says the article’s author Alex Glennie, is “essentially a statement of intent and a triumph of symbolism over substance, designed to send a message that the government is serious about creating a hostile environment for those whose legal right to live and work in the UK is in question”.

I would guess that Elizabeth has contributed much to the UK.  She rents privately and is receiving maternity pay of £278 a fortnight from her job as a support worker for the elderly.  Elizabeth has been looking after London’s elderly parents and grandparents. Her maternity pay doesn’t cover her rent to the private landlord, food and bills.  Her husband had to leave his accountancy training course because of his depression and is still very ill following his suicide bid.  Elizabeth says he had to stop working while on the course because of changes in the visa rules (the couple are applying to stay permanently in the UK).

As well as myths about immigration, there are also an increasing number of  fables in circulation about why food banks are growing in “popularity” – for want of a better word. One of the 10 most common myths about food  banks is that they create dependency and don’t address the causes of poverty. If people come to a food bank more than three times in six months the system flags this so that the food bank manager can contact the service or person that referred them. They can then make sure a plan is in place to help the client overcome poverty. Elizabeth was referred by her GP,  who would seem to be very much on the ball and has made the referral to social services. Of course it won’t be easy for Elizabeth to improve her family’s circumstances quickly. But there are some optimistic signs now that she’s on the radar of  an alert GP and social services.

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Benefit delays leave ‘Michael’ starving – while DWP hides the statistics

I met “Michael” (not his real name) last weekend at a different food bank in a much more visibly run-down area of our London borough. It’s a massive area of mainly social housing, straddling two boroughs. Although it’s in a corner location among endless blocks of council flats, it’s hard to find.  I was driving – and arrived late after getting lost. There are no signposts or posters indicating its existence.

The volunteers here are amazingly kind and highly committed – as they are in the other food bank I’ve been going to in the last few weeks. But the tiny size of the public room here doesn’t make it easy for them to sit people down in a comfortable way and offer them a cup of tea and a biscuit. The volunteers do try to offer this when they’re able – depending on how busy they are. But usually clients must take their place on a sad row of chairs at the side, then wait while their emergency groceries are put together in the storeroom next door.

Michael sat there quietly in this gloomy room  – imagine something worse than the most depressing GP surgery you might ever have been to – and told me why he’d ended up there.  As is the case for many of the people I’ve come across in the last few weeks, he’s run out of food because of delays to his benefits.

Life has not treated him well. He used to work for a charity before becoming unemployed. The Jobcentre has now stopped his money because he missed an appointment.  He says the reason he didn’t make the appointment was because he had been attacked and assaulted and was making a statement to the Police at the time of his Jobcentre appointment. He claims he was attacked by three men – two of whom he says are now back in prison, and the third is ‘on the run’.

The case, says Michael has still to come to court. He adds: “They were drunk and they put me in hospital. They haven’t been sentenced for this, but they (the Police) put them straight back into prison. I had a statement from the Police to say they were with me. I sent the form to the Department of Work and Pensions  (DWP), but they weren’t happy with that. I’ve had four to five weeks without any money. It’s very difficult to survive.”

This is an understatement. Michael is 39, and he’s fading away. His spirit and his body have been damaged by this attack. I wonder whether the assault has destroyed him, and whether he will be able to overcome such a setback. Has he reached the stage of thinking that this is what must be accepted from life?  Because he can’t afford to eat, his weight is down to nine and a half stones. He says that previously he was about 11 stones. This is the first time he’s had to use a food bank.  His private landlord understands his situation, he says – so at least he has a roof over his head.

This food bank and the others in the borough, were set up by the Trussell Trust, in partnership with churches and communities. It’s one of almost 400 currently launched by the charity nationwide.  Alan, the food bank manager for all the borough’s food banks, says the DWP produces its own voucher that it can give to those claimants it chooses to refer to a food bank. But the DWP opted to introduce its own voucher in April that no longer records the reasons why a claimant has been referred. Before then a tick box had been included that allowed them to record the reasons for referral, including delays to paying benefit. “The DWP is trying to camouflage the numbers by taking the tick boxes off these vouchers,” says Alan.

According to an article by Patrick Butler in the Guardian, this move by the DWP was “a petty, cynical obfuscation”.  That sounds about right to me.  As he puts it, the move “smudges and distorts reality”. But the Trussell Trust  – which is still using the original DWP forms as a data source,  said in April that 30 per cent of claimants were referred because of benefit delays.  That  figure feels much higher here – and we’ll return to this crucial issue very soon.

‘Elizabeth’, her sick husband, and the knife

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt is appointing a new NHS director of costs. His job, says Mr Hunt, will be  to help the health service ‘get better’ at charging immigrants who are already in Britain, but not eligible for free treatment on the NHS. The coalition’s position is that short term immigrant and foreign visitors should pay more than £500m a year towards the cost of their NHS care.

Let’s look at the account of one woman who came to our London food bank a few days ago, and who happens to be making an immigration application.  ‘Elizabeth’ (not her real name)  came to the UK from Nigeria with her husband in 2010, and she is the quietest, saddest-looking woman I’ve seen for a long time. She brought her baby boy of seven months, who was fast asleep.

In a voice that’s no more than a whisper, she slowly, painfully, tells me her story.  I desperately hope that this is the worst account from a food bank client that I ever have to pass on.

Both Elizabeth and her husband have been renewing their visas while they try to negotiate the immigration application process. They also have two older children  – a girl of eight and a son of five. Elizabeth says: ‘My husband is in hospital. He has depression and he’s had it since 2010. He was working for 20 hours a week, and was also a student. But the rules changed and he wasn’t allowed to work. He was studying to be an ACCA (chartered accountant), and he has passed the first stage. But he has been in hospital now for over a month.’

How do they all survive, now that he is unable to work? ‘My maternity pay is the only money coming in. I get £278 every fortnight, from my job as a support worker for the elderly. A social worker is getting involved now, and is looking at whether there will be any financial help with regard to the rent.’

Why has a social worker suddenly intervened? Elizabeth tells me of the terrible circumstances which led to her husband being taken into a mental health unit as an in-patient recently: ‘He tried to commit suicide. I called the ambulance. My eight year old daughter got me a knife and I cut the rope.’ This poor woman’s daughter saw everything. By the time she’d reached the end of the account she had broken down and was in tears.

The stress this woman is going through, along with three small children, is horrific. Elizabeth’s GP was able to ease things a little by giving her a voucher for the food bank. We were then able to give her an emergency supply of food, including some nappies. She stayed with us for quite a while that afternoon, and I hope that talking to us about this almost unimaginable trauma, helped her – even a little. At least  – small comfort – she was able to feed herself and her two older children that weekend. She is still breast-feeding her baby.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Elizabeth and her family this week. Let’s hope that he responds well to the treatment he’s receiving. I’m not completely sure whether she and her husband have ‘temporary migrant’ status – It looks as if they do. What is a ‘health tourist’? Is Elizabeth’s husband one of those? If these new proposals supported by Jeremy Hunt do make their way into law – the Immigration Bill was passed yesterday by 303 votes to 18 – at what point during his recovery would some NHS doctor have to present Elizabeth’s husband with the bill for his treatment?