Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year

Summary

“I’ve sat and cried many times, feeling like I’ve let my kids down,” is the heartbreaking description one Kent mother gives of the difficulty she has meeting her family’s needs.With four children still under 13, the family live in a rented flat in the town of Herne Bay on the county’s north coast. She does not come to the door, but her partner passes a handwritten note relaying their meagre existence on benefits as the Guardian joins the local food bank’s morning delivery round.“I have to be careful with electric and gas, and food has to be £1 frozen food,” she writes. “Snacks are a very rare treat. If it wasn’t for the Canterbury food bank we would have nothing but pasta.“At Christmas my children will have small stuff and that will mean less money on food, more stress and worry.”The charity is in the frontline of an ongoing cost of living crisis that Rachel Reeves has promised to tackle in her budget next week with measures to slow price rises.In 2019, the food bank, based on an industrial unit in nearby Whitstable, was giving out 450 parcels a month. Now, a typical month involves well over 1,100 parcels, sometimes in excess of 1,400. The quantity of food going out of the door puts the charity, which covers Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay, in the top 5% of food banks in the country.When these kinds of services were first established in the UK after the 2008-09 financial crisis, most people thought they would outlive their value in two or three years. But on what is the Guardian’s third visit to the food bank in four years this one shows no sign of reaching its use-by date.In February 2022, the charity had gone from spending virtually nothing on food (as donations matched demand) to about £3,000 a month as the Covid crisis segued into a cost of living crisis. When we returned the following year, its monthly food bill was £7,000. Today it is £10,000.It receives generous support locally, with food donations rising and coming in at between 1,100 and 1,400kg a mont...