BENEFIT cuts have created a kind of famine’ one of the over twenty million people who have visited food banks this year said, the Trussell Trust reported yesterday.
The Trussell Trust released their new report aptly entitled ‘Below the Breadline’ which criticises the Tory coalition government’s benefit sanctions which plunge families into ‘destitution and hunger’.
The report also highlights low pay as contributing to the crisis: ‘Tackling inequality and food poverty means paying people fairly for their work. Low and stagnant wages, insecure and zero-hours contracts all mean that for some households the money they are bringing home is less every month than their essential outgoings. Despite their best efforts, many people cannot earn enough to live on.’
The report adds: ‘Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty have calculated that 20,247,042 meals were delivered to people in food poverty in 2013/14 by three of the main food aid providers (Trussell Trust, Fareshare and Food Cycle). This is a 54 per cent increase on 2012/13, when the same providers distributed just over 13 million meals.’
The report continues: ‘In May 2014, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that the richest one percent of Britons own the same amount of wealth as 54 per cent of the population. The same month, the Sunday Times reported that the 1,000 richest people in the UK had doubled their wealth in five years.
‘As this elite gets richer and richer, millions of people across the UK are living below the breadline. Food poverty is one of the starkest signs of inequality in the UK, and, as the evidence in this report shows, it is increasing fast.’
The report includes case studies of families that have been forced into abject poverty as a result of the Tory coalition’s attacks on benefits and the Welfare State.
Melissa from Manchester said: ‘It feels like we’re going back in time. The welfare reforms are causing a sort of famine – because people are struggling.’
