Food banks brace for ‘worst winter yet’ with demand for over 1 million emergency parcels

Food banks are bracing for their worst winter yet with more than 600,000 people expected to need support, a leading charity has warned.

The Trussell Trust, which runs a nationwide network of over 1,000 food banks, has predicted it will need to provide more than one million emergency food parcels this winter. It will be the most they’ve ever delivered during the winter months from December to February, with 904,000 distributed last year and is a third of the record near-3 million it handed out in the year to March.

Last winter, food banks across the network supported more than 220,000 children with emergency food and 225,000 who needed to use a food bank for the first time. This year the numbers are expected to be even higher, the charity said.

Natasha Copus, a manager at Southend Foodbank, said the charity was facing the next six months “with trepidation”.

“Our food bank distribution centres have seen unprecedented need in our community,” she said. “We have had to buy around half of the food we give out already this year and that is not even with the added pressure of heating and energy that people will face this winter.”

Emma Revie, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, said: “We don’t want to spend every winter saying things at food banks are getting worse, but they are.”

She said food banks urgently “need donations of food for emergency parcels and money to fund costs such as purchasing of food to meet the shortfall in donations they are currently experiencing.”

Previous research by the charity found that one in seven people in the UK are going hungry because they can’t afford spiralling food costs.

A 50-year-old single mother-of-two said she used food banks because she only had a single tin of beans left in her cupboard. “My daughter was saying. ‘Mum, have we got to have beans again? Can’t we have this? Can’t we have that? ... I’ve failed my family because I couldn’t feed them properly.”

One in four people referred to food banks said they experience severe social isolation, and said they only see family, friends or neighbours less than once a month, the charity reported.

Sabine Goodwin, from the Independent Food Aid Network, said: “The food banks in our network are reporting unprecedented demand and increasing concerns about their capacity to cope both physically and mentally.

“A ‘sticking plaster’ food parcel can only ever temporarily alleviate the problem of poverty and Trussell Trust food banks represent the very tip of the UK’s food insecurity iceberg.”

Ms Goodwin called on the government to ensure that benefits are uprated in line with inflation so that more people aren’t pushed into food poverty.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union repeated a call made by various charities and children’s organisations for free school meals to be extended to all pupils to try to tackle poverty and child hunger which he said “have tremendous social and moral costs”.

He said: “That food banks are gearing up to support even more people than last winter is a damning sign that the government has failed to support people through the cost of living crisis and presided over a decline in living standards.”