Food Banks (Scotland)

Cathy Jamieson Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy) on securing the debate. It is timely, given that we are looking ahead to enjoying ourselves over Christmas and new year. It is important that we spend some time reflecting on the circumstances of those who are perhaps not quite so fortunate. Perhaps more importantly, we also need to look at what we can do to renew our efforts to deal with this issue when we return to Parliament next year.

This morning on the BBC, I heard a report about the number of children—particularly primary-age children—being fed by schoolteachers, and I am sure my hon. Friend will be familiar with that, given his background in education. From my contact with many primary teachers in my local area and further afield in Scotland, I know that that is not uncommon. For many years, teachers simply would not see children going without a packed lunch or a meal, so it was quite shocking to discover the number of parents in my area who are in arrears with their school meals charges; indeed, that caused a particular problem in the primary school in the village I live in. That is a real concern, because people who are not entitled to free meals, but who are none the less on relatively low incomes, are finding they cannot pay for a school meal for their child. That is a big worry.

In some ways, food banks have made the problem much more visible. For many years, families and the wider community helped out where they could, but the problem now is that many people simply do not have those local networks. Similarly, families do not have the resources to help out, and the grannies, the aunties or whoever would traditionally have helped out may now find that the cuts to benefits and pensions, and the other things that are impacting on them, mean they are unable to help out in the same way.

No one would have wanted to see food banks being set up. For many years, I worked in social work, and I had to go to homes to deliver food parcels on many occasions. It was not a part of the job that I enjoyed, because it was sometimes difficult for the people on the receiving end to ask for help and to feel that they were obliged to others for the help they had been given. However, I recognise that those who have set up food banks are those who have decided they will not simply pass by on the other side of the street, let others take on the responsibility or watch as others suffer.

The sixth food bank to open in Scotland under the auspices of the Trussell Trust was set up in my area of East Ayrshire by Cheryl Forbes and her now husband Gordon Cree. They are well known in my community, and Cheryl is a renowned opera singer. Her background was not particularly well off, but she has done extremely well for herself. Like many people from such a background, she was determined to put something back. When she talked about setting up the food bank in an interview in the local Kilmarnock Standard, she said she remembered vividly how her granny went without so that she could have a meal, following a change in the family’s circumstances, and that has stayed with her.

Many of us would recognise that personally or from the experiences of others we know. Indeed, I was recalling with someone just the other day how we as kids did not actually believe that women ate or sat down at family meals. Quite often, the children would be fed, but the mother or the granny would disappear into the kitchen, saying, “I’ll get something later.” It was only years afterwards that we understood that they never really got something later, because the children were fed, but the mother or the granny went without.

Cheryl set up the food bank, and she has recruited a number of volunteers. The organisation is now very successful, although, ironically, that does not give her and the volunteers a great deal of pleasure. It is doing well—it has recruited the volunteers, got the donations and regularly been out collecting—but it is seeing increasing numbers of people coming for help.

From a very small start in the village of Darvel, with support from the local church, the service has expanded to cover the whole of East Ayrshire, which includes rural communities. It now needs a delivery service to take food out to people in emergency situations in some rural areas. As we have heard, many of those people are not necessarily the ones who have been on low incomes or on benefits for years—ironically, some of those people can manage their money, despite their limited income, because they know exactly how much they have coming in. The people who come to the food bank are those on low wages who have experienced some problem—either, as has been suggested, because of delay in the payment of in-work benefits, child maintenance or something of that kind, or because of unexpected outlay from family income. That could be something as simple as a child needing new shoes or a coat for the winter, so that the family budget for that period is suddenly blown. The people who come to the food bank are of course in a crisis, and need help there and then.

I spent some time with local volunteers and particularly wanted to mention the help that we had. Those helping in the past few months have included Sainsbury’s, the Co-op, Asda and Tesco. The volunteers I was out with a couple of weeks ago, making collections at Tesco, were Rob Hamilton, Linda Nagle and Elaine Haining, who is a Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers representative at Tesco—and, indeed, Tesco staff. There were people who came quietly up to me—some of them on very low incomes themselves—to hand over a couple of tins or a couple of packets of pasta, because they know what it is like not to know where the next meal is coming from and whether they can feed their children.

Surely, despite all the effort that has been put into setting up food banks, that is an indictment: in the 21st century we have a situation that I believed—years ago, when I was involved in social work—we could eradicate, by ensuring that there was a safety net. The problem now is that the safety net is being unravelled bit by bit, and the real terms cuts in in-work benefits in the autumn statement mean that more people will have to rely on food banks in future. I praise the volunteers and everyone who does not walk by, so that people are fed, but I cannot see that that is a good thing in 21st-century Scotland.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Brown]

I identify where the hon. Lady’s loyalty lies, but a question that she and her colleagues in the Scottish Government need to answer is: why were we seeing cuts to local government in Scotland three years before the block grant was cut? There was no need for that whatever. I know that the money was not as great as she might have expected, but we saw cuts three years before the block grant was reduced.

In conclusion, the dilemma that families face—some of which I hope we share—will only be compounded as we move through the next 12 months. There will be universal credit for those in receipt of benefits, and it will be delivered directly to them, so housing benefit and council tax credit will be delivered to the person applying, rather than going directly to where it should be going. Families will get the money, and then the dilemma for them will be: will they pay their rent, or their council tax?

[Cathy Jamieson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the bedroom tax is already having an impact, and that it will also be a major feature?

[Mr Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We will compound the problem when people have to make choices. Is it a meal on the table, a pair of shoes for the son or daughter, or paying the rent? I, thankfully, do not have to make those choices, but I am there with people who have to make such difficult decisions.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Betts.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy) on securing this timely debate and on speaking with such eloquence and passion about the real picture affecting his constituents in Fife. I also praise the contributions of my hon. Friends the Members for Livingston (Graeme Morrice), for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Cathy Jamieson), for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie), for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown), and I commend the contribution of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford).

As people across the country prepare to celebrate the festive season, it is right that we all consider the effects of policy on those who are struggling to make ends meet. Sadly, this year the number of people struggling in food poverty has risen dramatically. I hope the Minister, unlike the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) in a debate in this Chamber last week, will acknowledge that food poverty is a growing and distinct social problem and will work to produce a strategy across Government to overcome it.

We should also remember the work of the Trussell Trust and other organisations that are filling the gap in society that this Government are so shamefully leaving behind. The Library of the House informed me on Monday that 6,196 people, including nearly 2,000 children, have been fed by Trussell Trust food banks in Scotland since April 2012. The difficulty in putting together the whole picture is caused by the Government failing to keep proper data on the prevalence of food banks, and I hope the Minister will at least remedy that following this debate.

The Scottish Government are not helping with the cuts they are making to the fuel poverty budgets, which threaten to abandon 800,000 people in Scotland to the scourge of fuel poverty. In addition, progress on child and family poverty has stalled under the present Scottish Government. I do not regard the investment made by the previous Labour Government in the tax credit system, which the Resolution Foundation has established was the principal driver of living standards being sustained to any extent beyond 2003, as throwing money at a problem; it was important as a means of keeping families in good living standards through a difficult period. However, I will focus my remarks on the current Government’s policies, which are causing the surge in the use of food banks.

Yesterday’s inflation figures were striking in pointing to the 3.9% rise in the cost of food compared with a year ago, whereas the consumer prices index measure of inflation is 2.7%.

[Cathy Jamieson]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that important point. Does he agree that it is significant that, within food pricing, bread and vegetables are the items that are most affected?

[Mr Bain]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The price of fruit and vegetables is rising particularly strongly. Fruit is up 3.9% in the past year, and vegetables are up 8.1%, all of which is contributing to what has been described as a nutritional recession, with people cutting back on the purchase of fresh food and relying more on cheaper processed food instead.

Last week the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published a study, which included evidence from Scottish households, showing that households in the lowest two income deciles are spending more of their income on food than they were five years ago—such spending is now 16.6% of their income—but their purchases of fresh fruit and vegetables have slumped because of soaring prices and the squeeze on household finances.

There is no doubt that some of the principal underlying causes are the squeeze on real wages in Scotland—down 7.4% in the first two years of this Government—the excessive pace of fiscal tightening, annual energy bills rising by an average of £300 since 2010 and the tax rises being imposed on ordinary people by this Government, not least the hike in VAT, which on average is costing ordinary families £480 a year in extra tax. As we predicted, the effect of those policies has been to strip demand from the economy, particularly from the poorest communities.

Three themes have emerged from this debate. First, the Government have no policy to counter the downward spiral of real wages. Under this Government, people are worse off than they were a decade ago. The effects of continuing with their policies were put starkly by the Resolution Foundation in its recent report, “Gaining from Growth”. Under this Government’s policies, real wages are likely to be no higher in 2017 than in 1999. People will be on average £1,700 a year worse off at the end of that period. With living standards in the UK declining at a faster rate than for some of our major European partners, perhaps seeing us drop to sixth in the European living standards league will focus minds in the Treasury a little more than has so far been the case.

Secondly, underemployment is affecting the disposable income that people in Scotland are taking home and are able to spend on food and other social necessities. More than 270,000 people in Scotland are trapped in involuntary part-time work or self-employment. There is a huge amount of evidence demonstrating the link between underemployment and low pay.

Thirdly, the Government’s policies on tax and benefits will increase reliance on food banks still further. We know that one major driver of the use of food banks among the jobless and those on low incomes is short-term cash-flow difficulties and problems accessing the social fund. Should this Government persist in introducing a real-terms benefit and tax credit cut over the next three years, they will accelerate the process by which people fall into debt problems and extreme poverty.

We need only consider the warning from history about where such policies take society. The cuts in the 1930s contributed to a situation described by Beveridge as one in which social evils such as want were on the rise. Surely we have moved beyond a situation where Conservative and Liberal Democrat Ministers—sadly, no Liberal or Conservative Back Benchers were willing to come to this debate to support their Minister or to defend these outrageous policies—would inflict that on the country once again, in the face of all the evidence on how destructive it would be to fragile economic demand and how it would endanger our social fabric.

The Chancellor said in relation to his emergency Budget of June 2010 that he would not seek to balance the books on the “backs of the poor.” He has at least kept part of that pledge, because with borrowing £212 billion higher at the end of this Parliament, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and debt higher, not lower, as a share of GDP, the Chancellor is not balancing the books; but he is making the poorest hurt the most through that policy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the policies announced in the autumn statement will hit the bottom 40% of the income scale harder as a share of income than the top 10% next April while removing work incentives for millions of people. Sixty per cent. of the Chancellor’s welfare cuts will affect people in work, and 76% of the cuts in tax credits in Scotland will hammer families in which someone works.

In the Minister’s constituency, which I have researched, 83% of the tax credit cuts will affect people in work. In the constituency of the Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore), 82% of the tax credit cuts will hammer people in work. How on earth is that defensible?

The politics behind what the Government are doing are equally contemptible. The Scottish National party Government are attempting to divide us geographically from the rest of the UK, but this Government are attempting to divide people socially and economically form their neighbours.

This has been a good debate, but now it requires a proper response from the Government, who must answer why, in a rich country, they are prepared to tolerate the return of involuntary reliance on charity rather than adopt a proper policy to tackle food poverty and boost wages and living standards. They must answer why they are prepared to demonise the poor rather than join the rest of Scottish society in ending poverty. They must answer why, in losing their battle to recapture lost economic growth, they risk losing something even bigger: their sense of morality and what makes Scotland a good society.