Food Banks

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kingsmill]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to eliminate the need for food banks.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)]

My Lords, this Government are committed to reducing mass dependence on emergency food parcels. Tackling poverty and getting Britain working will be the foundation of our approach. The Child Poverty Taskforce will publish a UK-wide strategy in the spring, and we will soon publish a White Paper setting out our plans to reform employment support to help people enter work, and stay and progress in it.

[Baroness Kingsmill (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that the very existence of food banks in the UK is shameful? Notwithstanding our admiration for the amazing efforts of the thousands of volunteers around the country in community groups, schools and churches and their efforts to tackle food poverty, it is nevertheless shocking to learn that there are nearly 3,000 food banks in this country. Special thanks must go to the Trussell Trust, which operates 1,400 of them. Hungry families should not have to rely on charity to feed their children in one of the richest countries in the world. It is the political choices made over the past 14 years that have caused this. What choices will the Government now make to eliminate the need for food banks?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for raising this extremely important issue. I join her in paying tribute to the Trussell Trust and to the many community and faith groups that run food banks. I have seen them in churches, mosques and community centres, and it is wonderful that people volunteer. However, like her, I am concerned that they have gone from something at the margins to help someone when they run into trouble, to mass dependence and an integrated part of the system. Something has gone wrong in recent years that we now see 2.3 million people living in households where a food bank was used in the last 12 months. We are committed to ending mass dependence on emergency food banks.

My noble friend talked about families with children. The Secretary of State made this one of her early priorities. She gathered around her a food poverty round table with experts and charities. She has a child poverty strategy, which will be produced in the spring. In the meantime, as a down payment, the Budget yesterday announced additional help for those struggling with debt and for carers. We will offer free breakfast clubs in primary schools. We are getting in and doing things at the start, but above all we need to make sure the system works for families, and we will.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister not share my concern that the need for food banks might actually grow in the coming months? There has been a bad harvest and we produce only 16% of our own fruit and vegetables. Food prices are going up and the Budget yesterday will impact negatively on farmers. What does she propose to do to reduce the dependence on food banks, rather than increase it?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, what we are going to do is to support families. People should be able to support their own families, but research has found that if you look at households where somebody had used a food bank in the previous 12 months, 40% of those people are in jobs. Working people should be able to go to work and bring home enough money to feed themselves and their families so, for a start, the Government have just made a significant announcement about an increase to the national living wage. We have a plan to make sure that work pays so that people get into decent jobs and keep them, bringing home enough money to support their families. In the short term, we will make a real difference: free breakfast clubs in every primary school mean that children will not be hungry there. That helps the children and takes a big pressure off their families.

[Baroness O'Loan (CB)]

My Lords, despite everything that the Minister has said about the Budget yesterday, it is being widely reported that it will lead to lower incomes for people generally. Does she think that this will assist in reducing the numbers reliant on food banks, or will it inevitably end in an increase in those who have to rely on them?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the strategy came through loud and clear in my right honourable friend Rachel Reeves’s Budget yesterday. We have to get this country back to work and get it growing. If we are to reach a point where we can not only repair the damage done to our public services but rebuild our country, we have to make it work. The foundations were laid really well and clearly in the Budget yesterday. The Government have a plan to make work pay. We have a White Paper coming out on that and are reforming the whole of employment support. We want people to be able to get into jobs, keep them and progress in them—not just to make a difference to themselves but to rebuild our country.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, to pay for the Government’s healthy eating recommendations, the poorest 10% of UK households would need to spend 74% of their post-housing disposable income on food. The consideration of healthy eating is not a factor in calculating benefit rates. Do the Government believe that the poorest and most vulnerable people should have access to healthy food and, if so, how will calculations about benefits in the future reflect this?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I absolutely agree about the importance of access to healthy food and there are schemes out there to help the lowest-income families access it, particularly pregnant women and the parents of younger children. Having been asked by a noble Baroness previously about breakfast clubs in primary schools, I went off to check and discovered that they are to be covered by the school standards for food, so we will make sure that there are nutritious breakfasts there. But in the end the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, raises a really important point: we have to tackle the child poverty at the root of this if families are to be able to feed their kids appropriately. That brings us back again to the child property strategy but I am delighted that, in the short term, there were some down payments. One small thing, which will not have gone widely noticed, is that we will introduce a fair repayment rate for universal credit. It sounds really technical but reduces the total cap on deductions from universal credit from 25% to 15%. That means that 1.2 million of the poorest households have £420 a year more to spend, which makes a real difference.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, compared to pre-Covid times, when people tended to visit a food bank for emergency purposes—as a result of a home emergency—there is anecdotal evidence, as I am sure the noble Baroness is aware, that visits per head are more sustained and that the needs of those visitors are more varied. It is not just about poverty. It is about rising cases of mental health and domestic abuse, so what are the Government doing to help food bank volunteers to cope and to spot these signs in customers?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, our local jobcentres are doing very good work, as I am sure the noble Viscount will know from his time doing my job. There are incredibly good arrangements, including partnership schemes to engage with all kinds of local charities to make the connections, but the most important thing is to have somewhere to refer people to. I am afraid that our mental health service has been in such decline that, even if problems are identified, it is quite hard for volunteers to know where people can go. This Government are committed to restoring our mental health support and investing in child and adolescent mental health. As a down payment on that, we will recruit another 8,500 mental health professionals to work with children and adults. I am really grateful to the noble Viscount for raising that really important point.

[Lord Sahota (Lab)]

My Lords, before I ask my question, can I wish all noble Lords a happy Diwali? When all food banks are eliminated, do the Government have any plan for what will happen to all the surplus food that has been donated by the supermarkets and other retailers over time to them?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously I dream of that day. I have visited a fascinating place in the north-east called REfUSE, based in Chester-le-Street in County Durham. It gets free food and has people, as either volunteers or staff, who can help to create meals where people then pay what they can afford. It has branched out from that to start doing catering for events, such as weddings. This does a couple of things. It raises awareness of the tragedy of food waste, while showing how we can reuse things creatively to produce brilliant food; it also helps all of us to think better. If we do not want to end up with food shortages, we all need to get better at reusing and recycling, and buying well in the first place.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the chair of Feeding Britain. The Minister has just outlined one of our social supermarkets, which are a bridge between a food bank and getting people back into normal eating and being able to afford food. We sell surplus and waste food for about 30p in the pound with people joining a club depending on their status, area and income. They are taught to cook and allowed to shop with honour, and our cafes become self-sustaining after the initial costs of setting up. Will she agree to meet us or to come and visit some of our supermarkets? I can see that she has already visited one. They are a way forward, whereas the food bank is a way back.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, they both have their place, at least at the moment, but I would be very happy to visit. I have visited other such things but I am always interested in the creativity behind this. I have visited a brilliant one over in Waterloo, run by Oasis and the Catholic Church. It was fascinating that they were able to engage with and provide support to people who came in, finding out their problems and dealing with them at the root. But there was also a pantry, and somebody proudly told me how he could not only go and get food from it but had been able to cook dinner and invite his neighbours in. That is a wonderful thing to do; it tackles isolation and gives him the opportunity to give something out to others and to learn along the way. It is brilliant and I commend the noble Baroness for her work on this.