As the UK government report review of food aid gathers dust, an official study in Scotland is unambiguous about why more people have become reliant on food parcels
Unlike England, where the now notoriously "suppressed" Defra-commissioned review of emergency food aid still gathers dust on a Whitehall shelf nearly seven months after it was completed, Scotland has managed to publish its own, academically-researched study of the scale and causes of charity food provision.
Researched in September and launched in December, just before Christmas, the Overview of Food Aid Provision in Scotland examines the rise in food banks, the strength of the data collected by the Trussell trust food bank network, and the role of welfare reform in the growth of food charity.
Scottish Trussell trust food banks, notes the report, continue to grow in number and deliver food parcels to more people. In 2009, there was one Trussell food bank operating in Scotland; by October 2013 this had increased to 42 (with a further 17 in development). Overall, there was a 170% increase in demand in 2012-13, with benefit delays, changes and sanctions accounting for over half of referrals.
Numbers continued to rise this year: Glasgow South East food bank, for example, fed 682 people in the whole of 2012-13, but 1,200 in the first three months alone of 2013-14.
Low pay, the report found, was also driving demand for food parcels, as well as reduced working hours. Food banks reported "an alarmingly high number of children" were being fed, and one provider told the Heriott Watt University researchers that it had started to add nappies to food parcels if they were required.
The profile of food aid recipients, the study found, was changing: one food bank quoted in the report said of this relatively recent wave of hunger and poverty:
People who never had problems before are coming
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