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Reuters / Neil Hall
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More Britons are becoming dependent
on food banks as they find themselves plunged into poverty as a result of
stagnating wages, delays in welfare payments and the soaring cost of living,
according to a cross-party study.
According to a landmark report,
partially funded by the Church of England (CoE) and published on Monday, the
government has not been doing enough to tackle rising levels of poverty in the
UK, and in particular regarding hunger in the UK’s poorest communities.
The CoE, which has long warned about
deprivation in the UK, particularly criticized the government for failing to do
more to combat food wastage by major supermarkets, which could be redistributed
to the country’s poor.
The report, titled “Feeding
Britain,” was produced following a six-month inquiry by an all-party
parliamentary group into hunger in Britain, led by Labour MP Frank Field and
funded by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Charitable Trust.
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Reuters / Toby Melville
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Two Conservative MPs, a Conservative
Lord and a Labour MP were also involved in the inquiry.
The report is particularly critical
of the Conservative-led government’s welfare reforms, claiming that both the
reduction and delays in benefits has meant families living on low incomes are
worse off in the long term.
“There is a
clear moral case to address the shortcomings that exist in our welfare system,” the report says.
“Our evidence
shows that the current system is cumbersome, complicated and fails to respond
effectively to the daily changes in people’s lives. A single error can itself
end up being the recruiting sergeant for money lenders.”
Additionally, the committee warned
that the rising costs of living, such as household bills and rent, has meant
more Britons find themselves out of pocket and dependent on voluntary services
such as food banks.
“These
fundamental changes in the relative prices in budgets of food, utilities and
rent have blown sky-high the comfortable post-war assumption that our wages
system and our benefit system guarantees a minimum which most of us would regard
as tolerable,” Field said.
The report was published following
statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby on Sunday, in which he said he was shocked by the nearly
900,000 Britons now dependent on food parcels.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, the
Archbishop said it was “even more shocking” that families in the UK were going
hungry, and compared the situation with starvation in Africa.
“Hunger stalks
large parts of our country,” he wrote.
The UK’s main provider of food banks, NGO the
Trussell Trust, recorded a 163 percent rise in the number of people using its
services since last year, while Just Fair, a partner of the End Hunger Fast
campaign, claimed the UK “violated the human right to food and breached
international law.”
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Reuters / Paul Hackett
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4.3mn Tons Of Food Thrown Away By Firms Annually – Amid Rife Hunger
& Poverty
Supermarket
giant Morrisons binned of 10,000 Cornish pasties after their delivery driver
arrived 17 minutes late for collection, according to a report on hunger in the
UK. The report also found that 4.3 million tons of edible food is discarded
annually.
Only 2 percent of the waste food generated
by supermarkets, restaurants and food manufacturers is given to the poor. The
rest is left to rot in landfill sites.
In
extreme cases, like the Morrisons pasty incident, huge amounts of food is
thrown away because it is misshapen or does not fit supermarket requirements.
Don Gardner, a food bank manager from Cornwall, said he was offered 10 tons of
tomatoes because they were “too big” for Tesco.
“That
shouldn’t happen,” he said. “I was offered 30,000 spring greens the
other day because they were going to be ploughed back into the field. I
couldn’t have them because I didn’t have anywhere to put them,” he added.
The
report condemns the mass wastage of food, saying it is “indefensible that
huge numbers of people are going hungry in a country which wastes such vast
quantities of food that is fit for consumption.”
The
non-profit social enterprise Food Aware, which campaigns for the fair
distribution of resources, estimates the annual value of food thrown away in
the UK is £23 billion, two thirds of which comes from retail and producers.
The
report’s authors urged groups to make more of an effort to redistribute.
“Whilst
we acknowledge that a certain amount of food waste is unavoidable, and that not
all surplus food can be redistributed, we urge the Waste and Resources Action
Programme [a recycling quango] to set food retailers and manufacturers a target
of doubling the proportion of surplus food they redistribute to food assistance
providers.”
A
Number 10 source suggested the government is keen to examining ways to reduce
food waste.
“The
report contains some useful ideas about how we might cut down on food waste so
that perfectly good food isn’t simply thrown away,”
they said.
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Reuters / Stefan Wermuth
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Revelations
of the UK’s staggering food wastage come as a report on the growing use of food
banks shows the number of people living in food poverty has risen sharply.
According
to figures from the Trussell Trust, 900,000 people in the UK are in need of
emergency food bank supplies. This constitutes a huge rise from 350,000 in
2012-13. Over a third of claimants are children.
The report further showed
that new food banks are opening at a rate of two per week. 
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