Food banks

Suppose food bank sounds less distressing than soup kitchen but same thing , food given to the hungry and poor

This is why food baqnks have grown so much.
Over the last five years there have been over 279,000 people sanctioned without being informed why.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/13928559.Destitute_and_penniless___no_warning__benefit_sanctions_imposed_in_nearly_300_000_cases/?ref=twtrec

That's over a thousand a week. Caring Tories?

www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/22242

An interesting article about why there should not be jobcentre staff in foodbanks and why IDS wants them.

I hadn't realised before but when Universal Credit is rolled out completely, there is a five week gap built into the system, between signing on and getting your first benefit money.

I think it's such a sad thing that we have to rely on food banks in this day and age but I'm glad that they are there. Funnily I was just discussing similar things with my son before coming on here and he was saying during his working day as a delivery driver whilst making a delivery to John Lewis he pulled up next to a skip where a man was filling his bag with the waste food that is heartbreaking .

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/106068?reveal_response=yes#response-threshold

This is the DWP response to a petition asking for the government to do an impact assessment of all the cuts to disabled.
It's quite a long reply, but the gist is that they do not have the tools to do a full impact assessment.
Like all other ideas that IDS comes up with, he makes the cuts, punishes people, then denies that there is a problem in the first place.

This is why it is only IDS who can come up with the idea of putting jobcentre workers into food banks.
He cannot see the results of his decisions, cannot ask what would happen if....

Interesting!

'Food banks were rarely seen in the UK in the second half of the 20th century, but use started to grow in the 2000s, and have since dramatically expanded.

The rise has been blamed on the 2008 recession as well as the austerity measures implemented afterwards. However, the OECD found that people answering yes to the question ‘Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?’ decreased from 9.8% in 2007 to 8.1% in 2012, leading some to say that the rise was due to both more awareness of food banks, and the government allowing Jobcentres to refer people to food banks when they were hungry (the previous Labour government had not allowed this).'

From Wikipedia - figures from Society at a Glance: 2014 UK OECD Social Indicators

25% of pensioners and children. Sorry not to have made that clear.

DJ I'm not sure that tax credits is a way of distributing from the rich to the poor - just like its predecessor, income support, I always thought of it as tax payers subsidising low-paying employers.

It's quite wrong to reduce the credits before the counter-weight of increased earnings is in place - employers are not going to suddenly increase wages until legally obliged to do so.

I do agree that it's appalling that the government is trying to make foodbanks part of the system so that in effect, charities are making up for the lack of official support to those in dire need.

I presume the figures were from this report which also states:
Labour's record on poverty and inequality

Labour had very clear objectives to reduce poverty amongst families with children and pensioners, and accorded these objectives high priority. Tony Blair made a famous commitment to end child poverty within a generation, and Gordon Brown promised to ‘to end pensioner poverty in our country”. However, it is much less clear that Labour took a strong view on the appropriate level of inequality within the top half of the income distribution, as indicated for example by Peter Mandelson’s famous statement that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.'

With falls in income poverty, one might expect to have seen a fall in income inequality. Indeed inequality did fall across much of the distribution. Those on relatively low incomes did a little better than those with incomes just above the average. However, those right at the top saw their incomes increase very substantially with the result that, on most measures, overall inequality nudged up slightly

Tories have or are going to change it. Almost certainly because the current definition would show them in poor light.

I wonder what the definition of poverty was/is.

25%? A quarter of the population? Really?

Like I said, the Nordic countries do not have the same problems we have in this country because they do not have such a big gap between the top and bottom earners. They pay more taxes so that when they have problems with work or illness, they are given more money to live on.

Yes, but when we were in Finland (in the mid 1990s) people were complaining because the income tax rate was over 50%!
Now: The Personal Income Tax Rate in Finland stands at 51.50 percent. Personal Income Tax Rate in Finland averaged 53.10 percent from 1995 until 2014
That is a huge slice of your income.

www.norden.org/en/news-and-events/news/new-nordic-study-food-banks-have-a-big-unused-potential-to-minimize-food-waste

www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/10781-economic-downturn-causes-steep-increase-in-demand-for-food-aid.html

oxfordfoodbank.org/about-us/news/visitors-from-denmark/

www.thelocal.se/20150618/first-nordic-food-bank-to-open-in-stockholm

www.eurofoodbank.eu/

For those who like links!

Food banks are one of those phenomona that started as a good idea to combine a wicked waste of food with a need to help poorer people. It has snowballed - as good ideas often do.

When Labour came into office in 1997 childhood and pensioner poverty stood at 25% under the Tories when he left office it was just above 15%.

Brown may have introduced the tax credits system, which was massively expensive to set up and has been beset with problems ever since, but it only replaced the system which was already in place.

Brown didn't single-handedly lift all the poor out of poverty, any more than he saved the world banks.

Ana, that's why there are benefits, because families do not get enough to live on.

Oh, you're back, Niggly. I thought you said you were going to leave us to it.

Like I said, the Nordic countries do not have the same problems we have in this country because they do not have such a big gap between the top and bottom earners. They pay more taxes so that when they have problems with work or illness, they are given more money to live on.

The problem with this country is that those at the top want to keep more of their money and do not want to distribute it.
Tax credits was a way of distribution from rich to poor, which is why Brown brought it in. Osborne has got his comeuppance even from his own side because he tried to make poor people poorer. Now they are trying to make food banks part of the welfare system, which I think is quite appalling.

This is the point I was trying, rather clumsily, to make! Things are imperfect here but a darn sight better than some countries, for which, bearing in mind the size of our population compared to let's say Nordic countries perhaps we could give just a little credit, not too much, but perhaps just a little.

Talking of foodbanks (at the risk of repeating myself) if you shop online at Ocado you can make a donation

I sometimes shop at Lidl and spend what I save by shopping there, instead of Ocado, on a big bag of food for the food bank.
(Except for the milk, which I buy somewhere else at a fair price for farmers )

I'm curious. Is there any country in the world that posters here consider in every respect perfect
um, er, I was going to suggest Iceland, but then read this:
Iceland's new poor line up for food
I don't tell my children where I get the food, I'm too ashamed," said Iris Aegisdottir, an Icelander who has been going to a food bank every week for a year to feed her three children.
um er, thinks - Canada is prosperous, isn't it?
www.foodbankscanada.ca/Learn-About-Hunger/About-Hunger-in-Canada.aspx

I know there are food banks in Australia.

I know - New Zealand!!
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/what-happens-when-you-scrap-the-welfare-state-new-zealand-has-and-its-economy-is-stronger-but-there-1428688.html


I am trying to find one, nigglynellie
But perhaps those countries without food banks are those countries who have ragged street children living on rubbish dumps.

The UK may not be perfect and of course problems need to be faced and if possible solved - but it is a damn sight better than many many other places in the world.

Here is another: the government and local authorities sort out a housing system that aims to keep people within their areas and in close touch with their informal networks.

There should be a conscious effort when families have housing problems to ensure children stay in the same school until an acceptable permanent housing solution is found (moving someone 40 plus miles to a new home is not an acceptable solution). Likewise rehousing is not acceptable if someone has to leave their job of travel great distances to get to it.

whitewave's suggestion that the benefit sanctions regime be revisited and improved is a good one. Do universities do this kind of research? If so, who would fund it (I'm guessing not the current government)?

Sorry, personal.

Careful dj, don't go too far with the person comments.

Ha,ha! Apparently DD needs an annual income of nearly £31,000 (no chance!)

I, however, am supposed to be able to manage on just under £8,000 p.a....