Food poverty is an attack on society

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/16/food-poverty-attack-society-food-bank-triples

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Food banks are now helping three times as many people as they were a year ago. Oxfam and the Red Cross are both supporting food programmes. Another British charity, Save the Children, has launched a UK campaign expressly to raise awareness of the issues behind the steep rise in numbers of young people caught up in poverty. This cannot be what David Cameron's "big society" was supposed to look like.

The government is in denial. Ministers talk of chaotic families, of individuals making bad choices. They suggest the underlying reason for the trebling of the numbers receiving food parcels from the Trussell Trust in the six months to September – to an astonishing 355,000 people – was a spread in the number of food banks. Of course, each of these is a factor. But even taken together, they don't begin to account for the surge of desperation represented by the figures.

People on the ground tell a different story. Roughly a third of their clients are driven to desperation by delays in benefit – no change in proportion, only in the numbers. The new factor is the impact of changes in benefit, as the bedroom tax and sanctions bite, and councils get to grips with ever tighter budgets and smaller crisis funds. That now accounts for a fifth of those entitled to food parcels (which are only available to those with a formal referral).

There is a second significant factor. The combination of low pay and uncertain hours means more and more families are finding themselves tipped into poverty despite being in work. Today's figures show average pay is only rising at 0.7% while inflation is running at 2.7%. These are some of the rapidly growing number of families who live without any margin for error.

Politicians cannot simply dismiss the evidence of spreading poverty, or treat it as some kind of macho proof of the success of their policies. Nor can they, in all conscience, go on talking about cutting back on benefits without understanding what it actually means. They need to know that this is what George Osborne's tough love looks like on the ground.

There was a time when to see a rough sleeper was unusual. Now it is impossible to ignore the number of people who have no other option but to huddle in a doorway. There are a lot of explanations for that, not all of them instantly fixable – family breakdown, mental illness – but that is no excuse for the normalisation of homelessness as part of the pattern of urban life. How much worse if the kind of extreme poverty that means relying on food handouts were also to become normal. The chronic hunger and humiliation are reason enough in themselves – just read Jack Monroe's Hunger Hurts blog for a picture of what it's like.

But it's wider than the individual or the family. Every hungry person is an attack on society. Oxfam's new director, Mark Goldring, says poverty might vary in degree around the world, but its effects are the same everywhere. Exclusion and hopelessness, a lack of voice, a feeling of a life beyond one's control. These are corrosive emotions that eat the heart out of communities and undermine health and education and employability. If only for practical reasons, understanding the routes into acute poverty is vital. The Trussell Trust, Oxfam and the MP Frank Field are now all calling for a government inquiry into food poverty's causes and consequences. For more than half a million people this year, it cannot come soon enough.

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