Tag: London

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.

Sick ‘Ashok’ walks miles to food bank after benefits stop

‘Ashok’ comes into this London food bank with his voucher, given to him by the Jobcentre. He wants me to use both his real name and the picture I took of him, but in the end I can’t. He’s too ill, upset, confused and generally vulnerable. He doesn’t seem to have been told precisely why the Jobcentre has taken the decision to stop his Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA). He’s finding his situation bewildering in the extreme.

It seems he opted to use a job club book to record his job search instead of  doing his hunting online. He thinks his decision to quote  the Yellow Pages as one of the  sources for job leads has triggered a benefit sanction. Ashok is originally from  Mauritius, but when I ask him about this, he can’t remember when he arrived in the UK. He thinks it might have been sometime during the eighties.  He’s is so anxious and unsteady that it takes over half an hour for him to be able to sign the food bank voucher given to him by that Jobcentre in the next borough that seems to be sending more and more people our way.

As the “recovery” we’re hearing so much about in the broadsheets takes off in some parallel universe, our local council is, thankfully, tuning into the growing level of desperation hitting this part of London. The council has done much behind the scenes to help support the food bank network here. I’ll write more about this. One food bank is open every day in this borough, so that people can always get to one when they’re in crisis. Assuming they’ve been given a voucher, of course.

The problem is that 58-year-old Ashok, who struggles to keep his balance and whose hands and legs are shaking, has had to walk miles to us. He had no money for his bus fare – and that is increasingly the case for those who have to get here. He is terribly upset and breaks down in tears as he asks me who is going to give him a job “at my age”. He shows me his anti-depressants and has made an appointment with his GP for a few days time. He asks me to write down a list of his symptoms that he can show to the doctor.  I write: “Hands shaking and painful, trembling legs, unsteady, not sleeping.” I suspect some kind of cognitive impairment, and he’s been unemployed for some time. His is not a life you would want for anyone….

He says he’s been expected, while on JSA, to apply for 20 jobs a week. He asks how he can do this. He was told to sign a form at the Jobcentre. He doesn’t know what it said and wasn’t given a copy.  He normally gets his money the day he came to us – but it didn’t arrive. We tell him to talk to his  GP about moving to employment and support allowance (ESA). This benefit, for those too sick to work, seems to be the right one for him. It’s unclear whether his Jobcentre has discussed this option with him and explained how to go about applying for it, before stopping his JSA.

The other food bank volunteers say that Jobcentre clients should get written confirmation of a sanction from higher up the system, once a local Jobcentre has broken the news that their money is being stopped. The way Ashok has been treated is shocking, and it’s left him broken. What lies ahead for a society that treats its most sick and vulnerable citizens in this cruel way?

A few days ago the Department of Work and Pensions launched  what it describes as an independent review of JSA sanctions. It’s led by Matthew Oakley, a member of the Social Services Advisory Committee. The review’s tight scope is to look at the clarity of information given to claimants who have had their benefits reduced for failing to take part in mandatory back to work schemes, and “what could be done to make the process clearer”.

As the void blog pointed out this week, the review, which is open until 10 January 2014, “doesn’t intend to consider whether sanctions are being misused, the impact of sanctions, or whether targets are being set for Jobcentre staff to sanction benefit claims”.

What kind of society puts thousands of ill and distressed people on unsuitable back to work schemes and then humiliates them by sanctioning their paltry JSA? Then launches a review into the way the humiliation is being explained?

Food bank mum is more positive, despite eviction notice

Elizabeth (not her real name) is looking better. She’s come back to this London food bank and  it’s wonderful to see her smiling face.  She has her head up and is keen to talk. When I first wrote about her here, she was so traumatised she couldn’t look at me and could hardly speak.  Her husband had been hospitalised following a suicide bid. He tried to hang himself, with their eight-year-old daughter a witness to all.  The youngster had to run to get a knife, then hand it to her mother. Elizabeth cut the rope and called the ambulance.

She brings me up to date.  Her young daughter has now begun therapy, and she and her brother have just started getting free school meals. People are now rallying to support this lovely mum and her three children – the youngest a baby boy of seven months. Elizabeth says: “The primary school was very helpful. They asked what they could do. The social worker has been visiting the children every week, and the kids have been eating better for the last few weeks.” Thankfully, some of the boroughs in this area are disturbed about the disgraceful fact that increasing numbers of families in this wealthy city are unable to feed their children.

Her husband is still in hospital being treated for severe depression, although he’s been shouting that he wants to go home. He and Elizabeth are Nigerian and have been in the UK for a few years. They’re applying for British Citizenship.  Her husband had been working part-time to help support his family while studying here to become an accountant. But he had to stop working because of a change in the student visa rules.

He got depressed, and has had to leave his course. You know what happened next.  He has been deemed a high risk patient, and will not be leaving his in-patient unit in the near future. Elizabeth says he is a good dad, who loves to see her and kids when they go to visit him in hospital. The family is now surviving on Elizabeth’s maternity pay of £278 a fortnight, from her job as a carer for the elderly. In addition, social services have got her to start claiming £47.10 a week (probably child benefit)  – the total for all three children.

Elizabeth rents privately, paying £700 a month for a one-bedroom flat. All five of them share the same bedroom. Her landlord has now served a notice on her to quit the flat. Amazingly – and this shows the incredible resilience demonstrated by many of our food bank clients – Elizabeth says “I feel more positive, though my landlord is still on my neck. He gave me two month’s notice to quit.”

He gave her a repossession order, which she passed to social services. Elizabeth says she became one month in arrears with the rent, and the landlord used her deposit to cover that. Social services have told her they can’t help until she’s evicted.

Neither will the Coalition’s “flagship” Help to Buy scheme  be able to offer any hope to Elizabeth. David Cameron says the scheme is helping first time buyers outside the south-east on an average house price of £163,000. London prices are much higher. Elizabeth has lost the battle to pay the  rent on the small flat that is totally unsuited to her family’s needs.

This London food bank – one of almost 400 in the UK run by the wonderful Trussell Trust in partnership with local churches and communities – has been able to give Elizabeth help of the most practical kind. But she’s now received her third supply of emergency food.  At this point Alan, the food bank manager, has to gently tell clients that it is now up to other agencies to solve the longer-term problems causing their inability to buy food. What will happen to Elizabeth next?