Benefit issues cause increased use of food banks

Families are often turning to food banks due to changes in their social security benefits, delays in payment, or other sanctions. The Trussell Trust as well as University of Cheshire recently reviewed hundreds of referrals to their services and determined that this is one of the main drivers of the increased usage of these centers.

Not only may a benefit sanction cause an immediate short term crisis for the family, but it is taking families on a low income months to recover from that emergency. In fact, the analysis shows that people may turn to a food bank for groceries for up to 6 months after the issue with their welfare or benefit payments has been resolved. So this study shows that a small change has long term implications.

This does not bode well for the central government. With the recent cutbacks in the amount of money available for local welfare, and with the new Universal Credit system continuing to be rolled out, many more people are sure to be impacted by benefit changes. This will drive increased usage of food banks across the UK.

The analysis of people requesting vouchers shows a few different types of benefit problems. Each will result in the increased usage as noted below.

For those with some type of change to their benefits, which is about 10% of referrals, they could turn to a food bank for as long as 4 weeks. It really does not matter what the change was…whether a small reduction in payments or a small delay. It takes a long time to recover.

About 25% of the referrals to a food bank are due to delays in processing applications. This is definitely a major issue with more people being enrolled into Universal Credit, as this scheme has been shown to take a very long time to implement. These families are turning to food banks for as long as 2 months.

About 10% of requests to a food bank are because of sanctions on benefits. This people are using a food bank for as long as 13 weeks. This tends to take a little more time for the family to recover from as they need to address why they were sanctioned to begin with.

There are many other reasons as for increased usage of foodbanks. No matter what occurs, Trussell Trust indicates that for families already on a low income, if there government funded social security is delayed or impacted in anyway, this causes problems. There are millions of people in the UK who rely on these entitlements and that live paycheque to paycheque. They can’t afford any delay or change to their welfare payments.

People are still faced with increasing costs of everyday living expenses. So the loss or delay of government income, no matter how small, will create immense financial hardship for the household. This leaves millions of families with a hole in their monthly budget that can’t be fulled in any other way other than food banks and similar charity services.