Last month local MP Emma Lewell-Buck highlighted the dramatic increase in food poverty that is occurring both in Shields and across the UK, and called for an urgent debate in Parliament to discuss what is quickly becoming a real crisis.
This week Emma has been working alongside a local food aid charity, Hospitality and Hope, to see first hand the toll that the Tory-led Government’s policies is taking on some of Shields’ most vulnerable groups, and to help the charity in its work providing much-needed help to the hungry and homeless.
On Sunday she helped prepare hot meals at the charity’s weekly soup kitchen at St Bede’s Church, while this Wednesday she and other volunteers prepared food parcels, and handed them out the following day.
Emma said:
“This Government’s attack on low-income households and the rising cost of food mean that many families are unable to put food on the table, and the volunteers at Hospitality and Hope offer a vital lifeline to those who would otherwise have nowhere else to turn.
“It is a disgrace that in one of the richest countries in the world people should have to rely on charity just to feed themselves. These people are victims of unfair Government measures like the bedroom tax, and its failure to tackle unemployment and give people in Shields the opportunity to earn a decent living.”
Government policies are a direct cause of the increasing demand for food banks, according to food aid charity the Trussell Trust. The number of people receiving emergency food between April and June this year was 150,000, three times the number during the same period in 2012. Over half of those said that squeezed incomes due to the bedroom tax, abolition of council tax relief, and benefit delays had forced them to turn to the charity for help.
Hospitality and Hope, too, said that they were seeing an unprecedented demand for help, and that many of the people coming through their doors had been pushed to breaking point by tax and benefit changes.
To find out more about the work of Hospitality and Hope, including how to donate food, visit http://www.hospitalityandhope.co.uk.