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Half a million in UK now on food handouts

Government policy blamed for alarming new levels of poverty
Half a million in UK now on food handouts

Picture: Shutterstock

Published: June 26, 2013 07:12 AM GMT
Updated: June 26, 2013 12:43 AM GMT

Let no one say we didn't see it coming. Half a million people are now accustomed to using food banks, and according to a report by Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty, the UK is now facing "destitution, hardship and hunger on a large scale". Whether this news will achieve the impact it deserves is currently unclear: it doesn't quite feel like it, which only underlines how inured the media seems to have become to rising poverty, and how easily the government seems to be getting off the hook.

Yet the facts are obvious enough: "Food aid" is something firmly built into our national life, the supposed safety net of social security is getting more threadbare by the month – and the question demands to be asked, not for reasons of melodrama, but hard political fact: what kind of country is Britain becoming?

According the Trussell Trust, the UK's single biggest organiser of food banks, in 2011-12, the number of people who received at least three days' emergency food was around 130,000. Their own informational material says that in 2012-13, "food banks fed 346,992 people nationwide", and of those who received help, "126,889 were children". Now comes this latest report, and the skyrocketing numbers speak for themselves.

Full Story: Half a million Britons using food banks. What kind of country is this becoming?

Source:The Guardian

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