More people using food banks

Increasing numbers of families and adults are relying on food handouts to get by according to reports from a number of charities. The charity FareShare, which redistributes waste food from major food manufacturers and supermarkets to social care charities, has seen a 20 per cent rise in the number of people it is feeding – from 29,500 a year to 35,000.

FareShare, which operates from 17 sites across the UK, has also seen a rise in the number of charities that have signed up to receive food for distributuon in the past 12 months, from 600 to 700. More than 40 per cent of those charities are recording increases in demand for their feeding services of up to 50 per cent.

Another charity, the Trussell Trust, says the charity’s foodbanks will feed up to 130,000 people in 2011/12, but says that the country actually needs about 1,000 foodbanks to ensure most people have access to one.

One of the major changes seen by FareShare and similar organisations is in the type of people they are now feeding. Where once it was the single homeless and the chronically destitute now it’s increasingly families and working people who have fallen on hard times.

See also:

Sharp rise in demand for food handouts from poverty-stricken families’, The Guardian, 1 October 2011

Plight of the families who rely on food parcels’, The Guardian, 17 December 2011

First foodbank in Northern Ireland opens’, The Trussell Trust, 22 December 2011


 

 

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