Tag: Trussell Trust

Help feed people in need appeal now underway!

At this London food bank, volunteers are getting down to Tesco today to encourage local donations during the three-day nationwide collection of emergency food.  Lots of new volunteers are helping with this wonderful event running at Tesco stores throughout the country.

The Trussell Trust is partnering with Tesco and Fareshare to hold the food collection.  The aim is to ensure its network of food banks can provide emergency food to more local people in crisis. Someone in your street or round the corner from you could benefit from your donation this weekend. Donate a can or two of food at your local Tesco store today, tomorrow (November 30th) or Sunday (December 1st). By doing this you can stop someone going hungry in your area.

One of the people being helped in our London food bank today was Theresa (not her real name), 49.  She’s working three low-paid part-time jobs, but had to give up work for a couple of  weeks recently because her 19 year old daughter is experiencing psychosis. Theresa, who has no partner, only gets paid leave/holiday pay in one of her jobs. But she had no choice other than to be there to support her daughter through a critical time. Theresa, who had to rush off to make it on time for one of her jobs,  says: “It’s very hard. Lack of money is the cause of everything, but I can’t show stress in front of my daughter, as she can’t cope with it. It does affect me though. My daughter is getting better, but it’s a long process.”

The donations made during major food collections such as the one this weekend will go directly towards making life a bit better for people like Theresa.

This is the Trussell Trust’s second nationwide supermarket collection, and Tesco is the first national supermarket to partner with food banks. Tesco will “top-up” your food donations by 30 per cent, making your gift go even further. It’s heartening that Tesco has recognised the level of need, as more and more individuals and families hit a crisis.  The Trussell Trust says it is “so excited that the UK’s largest supermarket has caught our vision and is working with us and Fareshare to fight food poverty”.

All food donated at Tesco food bank collections will go directly to the local food bank to help local people in need.

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.

Young food bank mum sells furniture to buy food

Amanda (not her real name) sold her wardrobe recently to buy food for her partner and child. She’s 19 and a full-time student. By this stage in the week, most of her classmates will be looking forward to a night out. Friday nights mean a chance to catch up with their friends and perhaps even go clubbing if they have a bit of spare cash. Things are different for Amanda, whose hair is starting to fall out due to the stress of life with an ill partner and a four-year-old son.

She came to this Trussell Trust food bank in London today because her  young family has been without child tax credit for 14 weeks. The Jobcentre gave her a voucher. Her 23-year-old partner had been signed on with an agency, offering him irregular and very part-time work with the local council. But Amanda believes the worry of trying to earn enough money to pay bills and buy food in the absence of the child tax credit brought on the terrible migraines that have forced him to give up work.

Amanda says: “We were living off child benefit and whatever we could sell of our furniture. My partner was put on employment and support allowance (ESA) because the doctor said he wasn’t fit for work. The ESA didn’t start arriving until a week ago, but we only got one week’s money instead of the three weeks he’s owed. Before he got ill he worked through the agency as a park keeper and he also did removals for a while. He  had a low and unpredictable income.”

I ask her how not having enough money has affected them. “We’ve both lost weight, and I’m really depressed. It’s very hard to get out of bed in the morning. My hair has started to fall out.” She lives in a council house where water has started coming through the kitchen ceiling, and she’s unable to use the light in the room until it dries out.

She’s trying her best to stay focused on her course – a BTEC in medical science. She’s in her second year, and if she passes she can go on to university. There’s a great determination to do that, but in reality, some days she doesn’t have enough money to get to college. She is entitled to a bursary, but it only comes every three months. Amanda needs the money now. Amanda feels like her college is not giving her enough support. “They say you can go and talk to the finance office, but that’s a room with 20 people in it and there’s no private space where I can talk.”

Amanda, her partner and their child are battling to create sort of  future  in their sparsely furnished flat. Meanwhile we wait for the long-delayed report on food aid in the UK to emerge. Commissioned by Defra, it should help explain why there’s been such a growth in the number of food banks. According to a Guardian article, the suspicion is that the report has been held up because it illustrates a clear link between welfare reform and the growth of food banks. Welfare reforms are certainly not helping people like Amanda and her loved ones.