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Saturday 10 August 2013

Summer of hunger: Huge rise in food bank use as demand linked to 'welfare reform'

Food banks across Britain are being inundated with requests for emergency meals as families struggle to feed their children through the school holidays. The Trussell Trust, which runs the country’s largest network of food banks, says this is the busiest summer it has ever experienced, with some of its branches seeing double the number of requests for emergency parcels since the start of the holidays.


Parents whose children ordinarily receive free school lunches are among those struggling the most, as they now have to find an extra meal every day. The trust says the situation is worse than last summer because of rising food prices – which despite falling slightly in the latest Government figures are more than 4 per cent higher than last year –  and the impact of the Coalition’s welfare changes that were launched in April.

More on the state of the nation here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is not just in the UK this is happening. All around the world in so called developed countries more and more are going hungry and are relying on hand outs.In my local ASDA store this week a big article on how this store is helping those who cannot afford to eat.ASDA, as I'm sure other companies are helping, support Fareshare. Fareshare is helping to feed over 43,000 people a day, a rise in excess of 7000 than last year. Many local churches do soup runs and maintain a local churches food bank to help those that cannot manage. For some it has never been easy but in todays world where the young expect so much we are letting them down. As it has been said many times,the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Equal status does not exist, thank goodness there are still those who do think of others and give willingly.

Jean