Food banks. Can anyone explain to me please

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/why-are-so-many-people-using-food-banks
http://www.trusselltrust.org/real-stories

http://www.trusselltrust.org/resources/documents/press/foodbank-report.pdf

In the unlikely event that you are genuinely interested.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/why-are-so-many-people-using-food-banks

 

I'm just thankful that I'm in a position where I don't need to use them. Of course there will be folk scrounging and playing the system but I know full well that most people using food banks do so out of necessity and I'm glad WSB chose one to be a recipient of our charity walk last year because as I say, I'm not in that position and it must be desperately sad.

Liverpool Red made some great points too and I'm with JC above on struggling to accept your motive here.

 

Ask a tory voter !

 

I've kept off this thread, seems attention seeking again, hope Dyson gets involved though.

 

My motive was curiosity, nothing more. If I wanted to have a go at people I would have worded my post a lot differently as you know I'm not exactly scared of saying something controversial if its what I think.

I've read Jimmy's links and pretty much every example in them falls into the categories I mentioned earlier, poor decision or shirt term changes in circumstances except with an additional category of benefit screw ups and delays. The same appears to apply to the lady in dsrfield-reds example and to the general theme of Sestrens post (though he mentions other good points which I hadn't considered).

I might be way off here but it seems like a huge difference would be made simply by better education. Not education in maths, science and history but education about budgeting, coping with debt, making good decisions and generally living on low incomes. I know there is martin lewis on TV sometimes and the BBC have thingsmlike watchdog but to be honest watchdog and the Dominik littlewood show seem to teach very little and martin lewis focuses on one thing at a time which I don't think helps. It would be good if there was a programming on TV where they help out one or two people at a time. It might already exist but I can't think of a show that ticks the box.

Do we really need a show every day that helps people with a lot of spare cash make money buying cheap homes and renting them out or selling them on? That's hardly helping the poor. Do we need a show which helps two millionaires find their perfect 8 bedroom country retreat in Somerset? Let's face it, if they've got 900k to spend on a home they can afford to pay somebody to find the home for them. What I'd like to see is a similar kind of programming where the presenters talk to the family/couple/person and get to the bottom of their problem then over the next half an hour they show them solutions and things to help their situation. One of the examples in a link above mentioned that the person writing the article showed the person using a food bank how to apply for some short term financial help. Surely they should have known about that anyway! It shouldn't be up to a reporter to tell somebody that, it should be common knowledge.

 

Ok, so you are made redundant tomorrow. You take a big drop in income and are left with benefits. No mortgage cover and it can take weeks for any money to come in (first time I signed on took over 2 months). The only jobs going are zero hours contracts that you have to take (otherwise you lose you benefits), and they can turn around and tell you no work is available so you can, at short notice, be without any income at all, and because you are technically in employment its hard to get any benefits when you need them.

You've also got genuinely disabled people having benefits taken off them, families being hit by the "bedroom tax" and austerity measures everywhere. When the government keep squeezing then more and more people will fall between the gaps and need the extra help from food banks and other charities.

 

Re: you forgot to mention the 6 or more kids

Yes a lot of the bad choices appear to have been made in the past and it isn't even as far in the past as a loan that takes a few years to pay off. Something as simple as signing up for an 80 quid sky package a month ago and losing your job today is a past bad choice that will mess you up now but how do you combat that? A change in the law allowing people who lose their jobs to automatically cancel contracts? It would help a lot of people I'm sure but is it really workable?

I don't really understand either why a prepaid gas Meyer costs more than direct debit. Logically surely prepaid anything should be cheaper as the company gets your money up front. Any idea why with utilities its the opposite situation?

And I had never thought about the problem of going to local more expensive shops because its harder to get to the cheaper shops. I'm also not sure what the alternative is for that. Free bus travel for unemployed? Maybe a good local idea could be something like a service which collects orders for lots of people in one area, and delivers them in one large drop to a pick up point. Tesc deliver to your house but you have to pay for it. Wouldn't it be great if instead you could select Wednesday evening at your local school and tesco would then deliver 50 customers shopping to that school for you all to pick up. Its only a quid for delivery on a Wednesday evening so it wouldn't break the bank for somebody (or tesco) to fund that 1 pound for it to be classed as one delivery and hey presto you've essentially got a local supermarket for everyone. Could the same be done with aldi and lidl? I know they don't offer that kind of service but I wonder how much work it would take for somebody to set up a delivery service for them in the same style and whether or not it would actually make a difference

 

The bedroom tax is annoying because in theory I completely agree with it. If you want spare bedrooms then pay extra for them or move to a smaller house. No problem at all with that. Unfortunately the way it was implemented was appalling and was never going to work without completely unfairly hurting people

 

As some of the replies indicate, this situation has developed sometimes through no fault of some people affected ( okay some people are no good scroungers !), but as some people thought fit to vote UKIP and therefore give the power back to Maggies lot get ready for the issue to get far far worse

 

There are a few circumstances some people are abusing the system of that there is no doubt. But there was a case in Chesterfield where a man was dieing of cancer and was deemed fit to work and all his benefits were stopped immediately and died before any inquest from the dss, apparently there are many cases like this.
Also a woman in hiding with her kids from a violent partner was not only sanctioned but her whereabouts were disclosed by atos to her ex and is now dead.
As I said there are cases that are fraud and need investigation but at the same time nothing is done about rogue landlords taking far more money from the system and landowners fiddling money right left and centre. Bankers who caused this trouble in the first place getting away with it and being allowed to continue as if nothing has happened.
But the Murdoch and Tory and rich backed press hammer at the lowest until all the rest is pushed to one side.

 

if you put food in banks, won't it go off?

hth

 

My mate runs more than one foodbank. He works in conjunction with The Trussell trust and other organisations. People can be referred to the foodbank by a variety of sources, Councillors, social services, Police, Citizens Advice, Credit Unions etc. I never realised till I saw it at first hand how many people are in genuine need . One case I can relate, a lad I knew asked me if my mate could help his mother.He was very concerned his mother might do something silly. The lady in question was a recently bereaved pensioner, The DWP had mistakenly thought the £169 a month share of her late husbands pension was £169 per week and stopped all payments to her, she for whatever reason accepted this decision , and started living off her small savings, when they ran out she missed a rent payment on her bungalow, the heating had packed up but due to missing the payment she was too frightened to get the Council to fix it. Her son then started buying all his mothers food, the situation became critical when his money ran out two weeks short of his next pay day, so the lady was left with no food and no heating, I contacted my friend who gave me two huge food hampers for her, he then contacted his friends within the CAB and they liased with DWP and within a few days everything was sorted out.
Having seen it at first hand, I never realised how many vulnerable people, for a variety of different reasons, are out there.
I would say anyone who questions the need for foodbanks (not criticising anyone on here ) should contact one and offer to put a days voluntary work in, I guarantee you will have changed your mind by the end of the first hour.

 

That is another example of a situation where the person in question doesn't actually need a food bank isn't it? By that I mean they are entitled to enough money that they don't and it is simply a clerical error somewhere that has put them in that position. That coupled by nobody actually sorting the error out led to no money. It seems that more needs doing to cut out these mistakes because so far I am seeing a lot of examples where food banks are used to rectify mistakes rather than because of genuine poverty. That's a dig at the establishment not the 'victims'

 

so you say that's shallow

sorry fella but it's so deeply true. I accept that there are genuine cases , but for every 1 real case I would wager these are 1 in 10. This is why I cannot watch TV shows like "Bread", "Shameless", " benefits street" and other such stuff. It just boils my blood, and just glorifies scroungers.

 

Re: so you say that's shallow

That's why I can't watch Royal Family, bunch of scrounging fekers who should be disbanded.

 

http://cesi.org.uk/publications/take-benefits-and-poverty-evidence-and-policy-review

 

The majority of people who use food banks are working are they not?

One of the biggest problems that people face these days are the inability to budget accordingly and " keeping up with the jones" ie getting the latest model phone every 12 months.

You are aware that there are debt management charities such as pay plan, step change etc that offer free advice and support? Within these they have tigger figures set out on what is reasonable expenditure. Within these things like sky and home internet access are seen as 'necessities' and you are allowed to allocate a proportion of your monthly outgoing towards these... From memory it's £50 for TV packages, similar for landline and mobile and 30 a month for internet.

When monies tight the only essentials are keeping a roof over your head, keeping it warm and putting food in your stomach not an iPhone six while watching the latest sky box set on demand. It doesn't help with 'interest free credit' being so readily available on everything from shoes to cars.

Until people start getting a proper monetary education and having the understanding of what is or isn't a priority within a financially tight household then the need for food banks will be greater than it ever should be.

 

Sanctioning is a big problem.

People don't know they've been sanctioned until they come to draw the benefit out of the bank. Often they don't know what they've wrong to be sanctioned until they contact the Jobcentre and in many cases they have been treated harshly. Also, not all food bank users are unemployed,

 

Your posts always seem to lay the blame at the individual. Whilst I'm sure that this does happen, have you any evidence to prove that this is the norm for the majority of these people. The many cases I've seen and read/been told about contradict your post.