Food bank Britain: inside the nation’s new emergency service
There are thought to be around 3,000 food banks in Britain – more than double the number of McDonald’s branches. How do they work, and who uses them? Stephen Bleach reports
Sophie Orpen has a problem. A message has popped up on her computer screen in a London office block telling her that half a tonne of surplus spinach is sitting on pallets in Staffordshire. In five days it will have started to rot; or, if she can get chiller trucks to deliver it fast enough to some of the 10,500 food banks and charities on her list, it will have been eaten by people who really need the vitamins. Meanwhile, on a nondescript industrial estate in Nechells, Birmingham, they have their own issues. A dozen or so warehouse workers are wearing anxious expressions along with their reflective jackets. The Tesco lorry is an hour late and they need it to be full of free food – but, I’m told, “It’s like a box of chocolates, we never know what we’re getting.”
The office and warehouse are run by FareShare, a nationwide food-redistribution charity. What they do is, in theory, simple: take some of the two-million-tonne annual surplus that’s generated by the UK’s food industry and use it to feed hungry people. If you thought of food banks as something small-scale and benignly amateurish, then a visit to the Nechells operation would make you think again. It covers 11,000 square feet. It has seven paid staff; half a dozen delivery vans; six huge walk-in chiller units and a freezer unit; and a roster of more than 60 volunteer pickers, drivers and crew. On an average day it receives, sorts and distributes about seven tonnes of food.
This is just one of 31 such hubs operated by FareShare across the UK; FareShare is one of a number of redistributors; and those redistributors are just a cog in a much bigger machine. In fact, there is a whole new division of the logistics business: Britain’s hidden infrastructure of hunger. Unseen by most of us, a parallel food supply chain has sprung up across the UK. From small beginnings it grew during the financial crash of the late 2000s and has now mushroomed to encompass leading freight companies such as Palletforce, supermarket chains including Tesco and Sainsbury’s, redistributors such as FareShare and Neighbourly and a clutch of smaller local outfits. Tens of thousands of volunteers keep the system moving. The entire enterprise may be motivated by altruism rather than profit, but it goes about its work with a businesslike vigour, efficiency and ambition.
And the system works. From FareShare’s HQ, Sophie had that spinach distributed to scores of food banks in good time. In Nechells, when the truck finally arrived, it had 1.4 tonnes of food, an impressive haul that was rapidly unloaded, weighed, logged, sorted, allocated and sent on to food charities across
Birmingham. Nobody is sure how many food banks exist across the UK. The best guess hovers a little under 3,000 (by comparison, McDonald’s has about 1,300 branches) but it’s hard to measure as they aren’t overseen or regulated by a central body. Many rely on surplus food redistributors such as FareShare; others depend on direct donations from shoppers – that tin of beans or packet of pasta you pop into the box on your way out of Tesco. Some have set up arrangements with caterers and retailers to chip in, and lots will use donations to stock up at the cash and carry if they’re running low. In an ad-hoc network, resourcefulness is everything.
The big outfits at least broadly agree on what food banks do. They provide emergency food parcels, free, to those “in crisis” – ie. with nothing in the cupboard and no money to go shopping. Plenty of people are in that position: according to data released this year by the independent think tank Food Foundation, about a million adults reported that they, or someone in their household, went a whole day without eating because they couldn’t afford food. The role of food banks is to stop those people from starving, not to sustain them long-term. So much is accepted: beyond that, the perspectives start to differ.
“If you thought of food banks as something small-scale and benignly amateurish, think again”
The Trussell Trust takes a rigorous approach. Founded in a shed in Salisbury in 2000 and inspired by a passage from Matthew’s Gospel – “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat” – it grew rapidly, mainly through churches. The trust provides its members with a blueprint for setting up and running a food bank, from health-and-safety guidelines to procedures for weighing and recording donations. You can’t just rock up and get food. Clients must be referred by an agency such as social services or schools, which have to confirm that they’re in need of emergency help.
Ifan is less prescriptive. It emerged in 2016 as an umbrella organisation for grassroots food-aid providers, which all operate in their own way. Many allow self-referrals, so those in need can just turn up; a handful blur into another, fast-growing sector – the social supermarkets. A relatively new model, social supermarkets provide long-term help to those whose regular income doesn’t cover their bills and food. They charge a nominal fee – about £4 – for a weekly shop worth up to ten times as much on the high street. No referrals are required; customers pick their own food; and, unlike many food banks, social supermarkets usually have the facilities to stock meat and fresh fruit and vegetables, rather than just “ambient”
(tinned or dry packaged) goods. The different bodies don’t always see eye to eye. Ifan in particular takes an overtly political approach. “A charitable response is not the answer,” says Sabine Goodwin, the national coordinator of Ifan. “We don’t want food banks to have to exist.” But behind the arguments about ways and means, there are people being fed. What does it feel like to be on the receiving end?
“I never thought I’d be in this position,” says Michael. He’s in his late forties, well- spoken, presentable; but when his career fizzled out he found himself dependent on benefits. “After my rent I have to survive on £65 a week universal credit. It’s just not enough to pay your bills and have enough left to eat around here.” “Around here” is the upwardly mobile suburb of Earlsfield in southwest London. There’s still deprivation, but it has gentrified fast in recent years. A few doors down from a Gail’s bakery, which does a roaring trade in sourdough loaves for £4 each, Michael sits outside Earlsfield food bank and wonders what happened to his life. “I was doing fine, then it all changed. The companies I worked for will only employ young people who live at home these days, because they can pay them less. I’m surviving on bare essentials. These people...” – he nods at the volunteers – “they’re angels. But it can’t change the fact that when I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is worry about money. I go on worrying all day. It’s absolute hell.”
Inside, the manager Charlotte White does her best to provide a respite – and with some success. Earlsfield might just be the chicest food bank in London. Under the Victorian brickwork of St Andrew’s Church, plenty of fresh produce sits in crates alongside the packets and tins. After “guests” have been signed in (anyone can come, but they have to answer questions about why they need help), they can lounge on squashy sofas or sit on artfully mismatched chairs in a café area, eating a free cooked breakfast.
The guests today are a mix of ethnicities and ages, from young families to pensioners. Some are defensive – embarrassment is a big bar to coming and guests have previously hidden in the bushes outside to avoid being seen by people they know. Some seem too ground down by poverty to care. Behind the scenes, things are grimmer. Charlotte takes me to a unit out the back where she keeps the stock. It’s so empty it echoes. “Last year we had so much stock we were planning to raise funding for another one of these,” she says. “Now, well, you can see. We used to feed 25 households a week. Now it’s up to 100... but donations are down by a half in the past year. Everybody is tightening their belts.”
It’s a similar story, in very different surroundings, in Portsmouth. The King’s Centre food bank sits near Somerstown, one of the city’s most deprived areas. The building is bare and utilitarian. “We’ve seen a 50% upturn in the number of clients in the past three months and donations are down by about 60%,” says Sam Hanson, the cheerful but realistic manager. So far, the King’s Centre food bank has never had to send anyone away hungry, but it’s getting hard.
In a back room, another team of volunteers busily sorts the food they do have available. “We’ll process vouchers for about 40 households today, which will feed about 100 people,” says Sam, 32. The bank handles only ambient food and you get what you’re given from a standard checklist: for a single person it’s a box of cereal, 500g of rice or pasta, some chocolate and biscuits, long-life milk, teabags, juice and ten tins – of soup, vegetables and so on. In the sorting room, Spam sits beside tins of value chopped tomatoes. It isn’t appetising. But in the hall where voucher holders wait for their parcels to be made up, they’re grateful to receive the food. Helen, who is in her late twenties, tells her story with a warm smile. “I was a barmaid, a good one too, but I was made redundant during lockdown. I’ve got two kids and sometimes I struggle – universal credit just isn’t enough to live on. This place has made a massive difference to me.”
Britain’s voluntary infrastructure of hunger has been a spectacular success, feeding millions. At the same time many at the heart of the movement have had doubts, wondering if they’re being used to fill holes in an underfunded welfare safety net; if their very effectiveness has become part of the problem. As the brutal economics of the coming year play out, there are signs that the infrastructure may start to crack under the strain. If it does, the question they face will change. It won’t be whether they should go on feeding Britain’s hungry. It’ll be whether they can.
The names of food bank users have been changed to protect their anonymity. A longer version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times © Times Newspapers Limited 2022