Tag: food banks

Mark and the Jobseeker’s Allowance/Payday Loan Diet

House prices aren’t the only thing taking off in London. There’s been a big spike recently in the numbers using this Trussell Trust food bank. Last week  13 clients came in with their vouchers during the three-hour weekly slot that  we’re open. That’s a significant increase on before Christmas. I’ll be trying to collate numbers this week to see if that  January increase is reflected at the other food banks in the borough.

One of the clients who came in just before the weekend was Mark, an endearing  man of 29, who had used another food bank at the start of the week. That supply would have seen him through for a minimum of three days. This time he didn’t have a voucher (the worker from the job centre who usually allocates them wasn’t available), but he decided to call in with us anyway. He brought us a box of biscuits he’d received from the food bank to say thanks for the earlier help. We weren’t able to give him a nutritionally balanced package of food without a voucher, but we gave him some bits and pieces that were still in date, and a loaf of bread that had been brought in that morning.

Mark has been receiving  jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) for some time. His last job was agency work as a barman and waiter. The company got bought out, and Mark ended up being paid two weeks after he did a shift. He told me: “I could be called up on the day, and I had to pay out £40 a week for my travel card, as the work took me all over London. I just couldn’t afford it.”

He tells me that he normally sets aside a small amount (£18-40) a fortnight for food. He carefully juggled all this and it was tricky. But recently things got harder, as he started paying off a hire purchase agreement to BrightHouse for a PC. He uses the PC (which he describes as his lifeline)  to prepare and send off job applications. Being poor is expensive. A typical BrightHouse HP agreement involves an APR of 70 per cent. He’s also paying off another loan from The Money Shop, where short-term loans of up £1,000 typically have an APR of 2961.4 per cent. He says his problems were also made worse (probably before Christmas) by bills coming out of his account earlier than he expected.

To make matters worse he got ill in October, when he hurt his right shoulder and arm, and the right side of his neck. This really affected his original  food budget (which assumed one to two meals a day), as the painkillers he’s taking require him to eat more regularly. It got to the point where he has needed to pay out £4.40 a week more than is paid in – and that’s before buying food. The injury is in danger of turning into a chronic health problem. Mark is also paying a Sky subscription. Some will point a finger here and say he shouldn’t be doing this if he can’t afford food. But try standing his shoes (size nines – needing superglue as the soles have come off) for a while…

Mark has a kind heart. On the day he was in he put his name down to become a volunteer at the food bank. He also helps his neighbour (in her 80s) to carry her heavy shopping. That won’t be doing his arm much good. What does he think will happen next, and what would he like from life in the future? I tell him I see him as very good with people and extremely thoughtful.  “In the short term I’m going to keep struggling to feed myself. A nice steady job would help and somewhere of my own to live (he has slept on a friend’s sofa for more than six years).” I suggest he goes back to see his GP and asks for better medication, some physiotherapy and help with applying  for employment and support allowance (ESA). The higher rate of ESA would make a difference until his health improves.

He looks gaunt, and says that he’s lost substantial amounts of weight over the last few years – about three stones, he thinks. Being on JSA is not good for your health. The Council of Europe in Strasbourg has recently said that welfare payments in the UK , including JSA (£67 a week) are manifestly inadequate. Our Government doesn’t agree.

Sign Jack Munroe’s petition and help people like Theresa…

What happens when you live in London and are working three  low paid part-time jobs,  only one of which offers paid leave? Then on top of that daily struggle, your daughter starts having psychotic episodes and you have to take time away from work?

This was the experience of  Theresa  (not her real name), who came into this London food bank on Friday.

Theresa is a single mum who recently had to give up work for a few weeks when her youngest – a 19 year old –  had a psychotic breakdown.  She combines bar work, cleaning and acting as a midday supervisor in a school, but the school is the only job offering her some paid leave.  So caring for her daughter through the worst of her illness plunged Theresa into an immediate financial crisis.

Those weeks with hardly any money worsened an already precarious financial situation. Her income is £439 a month, while her rent is £192 a month.She spends £10 on electricity and £15 on gas each week (British Gas is the provider for both) and she pays as she goes using a card. She now has credit card debts of £1,500,  council tax arrears of £400-500 and rent arrears of about £300. She also has to tackle working and child tax credit over-payments of £994.

This situation has pushed Theresa and her daughter into food poverty. Her daughter’s care coordinator at the local mental health trust spotted the severity of the situation and was able give her a voucher to take to this London food bank – one of  a network of nearly 400 set up by the Trussell Trust in partnership with churches and communities. As well as supplying the emergency bags of food, we were able to offer Theresa some contact details for the local branch of debt counsellors  Christians Against Poverty and another local debt counselling organisation. We also gave her contact details for the council’s welfare advice service and information about the council’s hardship fund.

Theresa has little choice but to live off her credit card, much as she loathes to do this.

Today, the Trussell Trust launched Give our Kids a Christmas, in partnership with the Mirror and the union Unite. The appeal is to raise funds to help food banks give foodboxes to families in crisis like Theresa’s.

This is a brilliant campaign, but we need to tackle the causes of the inequities that leave people like Theresa and her daughter struggling to eat. Why, for example, does the UK have a massive problem with low pay, with one in five employees low paid in 2012? See the Resolution Foundation report on this. Terrible as it is for the young, older lives are also being blighted. Nearly half of the low paid are aged between 31 and 60.

Food poverty campaigner Jack Munroe   has today  – in tandem with this Christmas food bank appeal – launched a petition via Change.org calling for Parliament to debate the causes of UK hunger. Why is food bank use increasingly so rapidly?

Details of the petition are here. It’s already got nearly 44,000 supporters. Sign it, please.

Paying npower eats up most of my benefits, says sick Christine

If it weren’t for the food bank she’d be starving,  she tells me. A while back  she went without food for 11 days. Christine (not her real name) says she eventually collapsed in the home she lives in on her own. “I came to, got up, and made a cup of coffee.”

Her neighbour’s daughter told her about the food bank, and she went down to the Jobcentre to get a voucher. This time – only the second time she’s come to a food bank – she had to borrow the money for the fares and take two buses to get here. She’s 51, but life has not been kind to her in recent years and she looks much, much older. She says that four years ago she was “almost killed by an abusive partner”.

Like many food bank  clients who live on their own, her first thought is not for herself, but for her pets. She has quite a few cats. Luckily we’re able to find some cat food too. This relieves some of her anxiety.

Christine is a qualified silver service waitress. She says the doctor signed her off work about 10 years ago because of continuing problems with sciatica and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. She says that six months ago she was told to attend a medical screening in Croydon (most probably carried out by occupational health service providers Atos), and that following this she had been assessed as fit for work and her income support and disability living allowance were stopped. Why does she think she was assessed as fit for work? According to Christine, the person who carried out the screening had said she hadn’t asked to go to the toilet, and had also answered her mobile phone.

She appealed the decision to stop her benefits, but like many food bank clients she didn’t have enough cash to attend the appeal hearing and it went ahead without her.

After approaching the local council, Christine got help with filling out the forms for employment and support allowance (ESA), and she has now started receiving this.  She says the council did not give her help applying for Disability Living Allowance.  She gets £143.40 a fortnight in ESA.  But because she had such a long gap without benefits, she is on anything but an even keel. She says she currently has debts of £4,500.

She’s paying off the cost of buying a washing machine from BrightHouse – obviously paying a lot more than if she had paid cash. But her major challenge is her electricity bill. Her electricity is provided by npower, and she says they’re telling her she owes them more than £2,000.  She’s currently paying npower £12 a fortnight to cover arrears/debts,  “but the majority of my money is going on this emergency meter, and if I don’t have enough money for it I just sit in the dark”.

With her focus on feeding the meter, sometimes Christine isn’t  even eating. “I’ll put my cats first”. She can’t use the freezer, because of the expense of keeping it running and the risk of losing food if her electricity is cut off. She’s been told she can’t switch electricity companies until she’s paid off £500 of debt.

Why are we letting private companies manage the most vulnerable? As Jeremy Seabrook illustrates in his new book  Pauperland: A Short History of Poverty in Britain, “the richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon the least defended”. Anthropologists no longer need to head to the Amazon or Polynesia to examine a “savage society” when they could just get an airline ticket to Britain, he points out.