An English Food Bank Is Fighting Food Poverty by Not Giving Out Food

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

On Monday last week, a rep​ort triggered hysteria about what poor people knew already—that food poverty in the UK is increasing. In other words more and more people can't afford to eat. With the welfare state emaciated by austerity, charities and food banks are being forced pick up the pieces—at least two new food banks are opening up every week in the UK. With over a million families relying on food handouts last year, there's little choice in the matter. But is the impulse to help people in fact just letting the government get away with allowing people to spiral into Victorian levels of poverty while ​fewer succumb to Victorian levels of malnutrition than would otherwise?

NG7 Food Bank in Nottingham thinks so, and has announced that it's going to shut down. NG7 says it is sick of the freeloading local council, which has been referring people to them rather than dolling out emergency money. The people behind it feel that they're mitigating the things they were set up to oppose—including punitive welfare reforms and harsh immigration policy—and reckon that the solution to food poverty isn't more food banks. They think there needs to be radical, structural change. From January they will be focusing solely on campaigning work and direct action, rather than giving people food to tide them over.

I spoke to coordinator Rob Graham to find out exactly why NG7 has decided to help the poor by not being a food bank anymore.

VICE: How many people use the NG7 Food Bank?
Rob Graham: We've probably fed over 5,300 people since we opened in July 2012. It varies from session to session—typically we have about 65 places a week, which the agencies that we work with can fill.

Has demand increased since you opened?
Yeah, definitely. We started out trying to feed 30 to 40 people per week, but we soon realized—especially as the welfare reforms kicked in—that there was a greater need.

Why do people use food banks?
​There's been greater need due to interventions by central government; there has been a definite increase in the pain that exists in vulnerable groups.There are people with benefit sanctions and benefit delay. We also felt changes around legal aid—there were more people that we needed to support from the asylum seeker community, who weren't able to then get their cases reopened. We've also seen an increase in what's known as the working poor; those who are on low incomes and zero-hour contracts have also needed support from the food bank.

What other factors have exacerbated food poverty?
​There are more pressures. The cost of living is more now. The cost of food has dramatically increased over the last four to five years. The cost of utilities has increased—there are a lot of people in fuel debt. There are a lot of people who are in financial trouble whether it be with banks, whether it be with loan companies, or payday loan companies. The fact that wages are standing still for those who are working and the cost of living is massively increasing is obviously a problem.

So people are getting poorer and at the same time they can't get help from the council.
​It's difficult for people to actually appeal and get support from local welfare assistance schemes. For example, in Nottingham, the local welfare assistance scheme and the hardship scheme run by the city council excludes people who have [had their benefits] sanctioned. This means that those who are experiencing a very sharp crisis can't get support from an organisation that is meant to be the place of last resort for them.

Increasingly they've been coming to food banks, but food banks should not be picking up that slack. The local authorities and those who run welfare assistance programmes should be finding ways of amending and changing their programmes to actually assess what's happening to people on the ground.

So why exactly did you decide to close?
One of the things we talked about when deciding to close was that it's easier for the local council to send people to food banks than it is to actually use their own resources. We believe that is actively being promoted by senior managers.

We're also very unlike most other food banks, because we believe very strongly in the need for campaigning and to actually support people to a point of resolution of their crisis. People like the idea of just giving out food but don't necessarily want to deal with the source of that. We need to do the hard campaign work.

But if you close, won't people go hungry?
​The number of food banks in our area has increased. When we first opened there were only five or six food banks throughout the whole city, now that landscapes changed and there are actually 13 maybe 14. So we're not leaving anybody high and dry, we're not leaving anybody vulnerable or unable to actually access food.

So you are going to focus on campaigning and direct action instead?
Absolutely. We're just going to use different sets of tools and have a different focus. Our idea was rebuilding our community right from the start, using the food bank as a method to get people communicating, to get dialogues going and to support people around common issues—the bedroom tax, changes in legal aid, welfare reforms, food and fuel poverty—it affects a lot of us who live in that kind of community, so we absolutely want to bring that to the fore. But we can do that without actually being attached to a food bank now.

Should we expect to see other food banks closing for political reasons?
​I wouldn't be anticipating it, we're not aware of many food banks operated under the ethos we set off with and we developed over this period of time.

Do you think there is any role for food banks?
I definitely believe that food banks could be a service, or a point of last resort, but not from the moment it starts becoming co-opted [by the state].

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