Inside foodbank Britain
Noël Staples reviews a personal account of poverty in Britain today
Why do people use foodbanks? In 2013 doctor Kayleigh Garthwaite began a five-year postgraduate project researching health inequalities in Stockton-on-Tees, about forty miles south of Newcastle and one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Her book, Hunger Pains: Life inside foodbank Britain, is based on this experience.
She worked half a week for two years beginning on 6 December 2013 as a volunteer at the foodbank run by the Trussell Trust charity in conjunction with the Hebron Church. She interviewed hundreds of people in detail, including both volunteer staff and any consenting applicant for food. All were aware that she was a Durham University researcher. The other half of the week she spent two miles away in one of the least deprived areas of Stockton, Hartburn, meeting and interviewing people through ‘coffee mornings, yoga classes, delicatessens, churches, mother and toddler meetings, a credit union and a multiple sclerosis group’.
A man living in the most deprived ward [of Stockton-on-Tees] will live, on average, 17.3 years less [will die aged sixty-seven years] than a man living just a few miles down the road in the least deprived ward [Hartburn, will live to eighty-four years]… those born in the poorest parts of Stockton-on-Tees can expect to live the same, or fewer, healthy years as someone born in conflict-ridden places such as Liberia or Rwanda.
Kayleigh Garthwaite’s book provides us with a chapter on ‘The politics of foodbank use in the UK’ and one on ‘What they do’. There are detailed descriptions of the Hebron Church/Trussell Trust foodbank and how it works, descriptions of volunteers’ backgrounds with reasons for volunteering, and extracts of her daily case notes. In the chapter ‘Why do people use a foodbank?’ many details are given of why people applied to the Hebron Church/Trussell Trust food bank, and of their backgrounds. It is not pleasant reading. Many stories, if not most, result from heartless, often-wrong, benefit sanctions. If you have already seen the excellent and disturbing film, I, Daniel Blake, you will find it variously exemplified from real life in Kayleigh Garthwaite’s book.
In the chapter ‘All work, low pay’ we learn something of the so-called ‘workfare’ programme, which provides jobs the unemployed are obliged to accept in return for their Jobseeker’s Allowance of £73.10 per week. These often involve doing work like shelf filling in supermarkets. In effect, they provide taxpayer funded labour, free to the supermarket (or other employer), while at the same time removing the need to employ a worker on the minimum wage, currently £6 to £7 per hour, or about £268 for a forty-hour week. How ridiculous is that? In one example:
Simon [subsequently a volunteer at the foodbank] was concerned that he was doing work for free that would make somebody else redundant, and he felt guilty about that, but he had no choice. [He said of the workfare placement:] ‘I went for the interview, there were seven of us and we asked what the job prospects were at the end of it and he said “Nothing”. Sweeping up floors and picking up rubbish, 7:30am till 3:30pm every day apart from Monday. I understand you’re working for nothing and showing you’re willing, it will help towards getting a job, but if there was a job prospect at the end of it, great – but there wasn’t.’
The final chapters, ‘Doing the best I can with what I’ve got: food and health on a low income’ and ‘Stigma, shame and people like us’, reveal much more of life on welfare benefits. The conclusion asks: ‘Is foodbank Britain here to stay?’ The New York sociologist Janet Poppendieck is quoted in the book with this advice: ‘Beware. Once you let the [foodbank] genie out of the bottle you cannot get it back there.’
This is an important book, not only for Quakers, but also for the general public to read – if only it could be got to them and they would read it…
Hunger Pains: Life inside foodbank Britain by Kayleigh Garthwaite is published by Policy Press at £11.99. ISBN: 9781447329114.
Comments
Thank you for this review and bringing the book to my attention. I volunteer at the local Food Bank run by a group of Lampeter churches and have bought the book which I will donate to our local library once I have read it. The local community here is extraordinarily generous in their support of the food bank’s work but there are still some people who question the need for it.
As I see it, one of the most worrying aspects of food bank use is the number of people who are in work and yet cannot afford to feed themselves or their families, and the ways in which our society (through the policies we allow our government to enact or not enact) subsidises large companies and organisations, including public sector and educational bodies, in their avoiding paying a Living Wage and using zero hours contracts to avoid the moral responsibility to pay their workers fairly.
By Julia Lim on 14th July 2017 - 8:47
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