With its colourful beach huts and quaint high street, Whitstable is a tourist mecca in the school holidays. But the pile of shopping bags in the Canterbury and District food bank tells a different story about real life in the picturesque Kent seaside town.
The nearly 200 bags, with extra treats such as leftover chocolate advent calendars poking out, are ready to hand out at 22 local schools before half-term as, amid a worsening cost of living crisis, they know some children might go hungry without school dinners.
But soaring inflation is not just hurting the finances of local residents, it is having a dramatic impact on those of the food bank. Demand for its food parcels is at a record high and it has gone from spending nothing on groceries to £3,000 a month to cover the shortfall in donations.
But not only is the charity having to dig into its own pockets, each pound is not going as far as it used to, as the price of everyday foods – from fruit juice to pasta, biscuits, breakfast cereal and long-life milk – climbs up.
The cost of the groceries in one of its standard parcels (enough to feed one person for three days) has increased by 71p – nearly 6% – to £12.64 since December, as a wave of new year price rises arrived on supermarket shelves.
Some of the increases look small – 3p on a packet of bourbon biscuits or 5p on a box of cornflakes – but are big hikes relative to the price tag of what are the cheapest staples the charity can find the high street.
This is one of the reasons anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe says the cost of living crisis for the country’s poorest households is underestimated in official data. The food bank’s shopping basket provides a proxy for that experience.
Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at the University of Kent, who is also one of the charity’s trustees, estimates that the cost of its standard food parcel rose by 6.5% in 2020 and more than 7% in 2021. The consumer prices index – the official measure of inflation targeted by the Bank of England – rose in comparison by 0.9% and 2.6%.
The price increases for other products in its parcels don’t even look small. The price of a 340g tin of corned beef has risen 32p to £1.79, an increase of more than a fifth. Orange juice is up 16p to 75p, or more than 25%. A bag of fusilli pasta is up 10p to 49p.
“We rely on public donations and they have dropped as the price of food has gone up,” explains Angela Gardiner, the food bank’s operations director. “So at a time when people are struggling because the cost of food is rising, our supporters are struggling to buy food to give us.”
In the cramped office on the second floor of the food bank’s small business unit, hidden away on an industrial estate on the edge of Whitstable, the number of calls fielded by Jennie Connolly, who works part-time as a “signposter”, continues to rise.
In the runup to Christmas the increase was “exponential” and has “not gone down”, she says. The callers, drawn from Whitstable, Canterbury and Herne Bay, as well as the surrounding villages, have little in common, she says – apart from the need for food, of course. The charity estimates three-quarters are either in work or short-term unemployed.
“They may have lost their job and are waiting for the first universal credit claim, which can take five to eight weeks in some cases,” explains Connolly. Some of the calls are, she says, very distressing. “People are desperate.”
Her job is to give callers “signposting” information, directing them to other agencies who might be able to offer additional support. It is difficult with pensioners, she confesses, because “there are not many places you can signpost them to”.
The pandemic has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of Britons claiming universal credit, up from 3 million in March 2020 to 5.8 million today (having fallen back from last year’s peak of 6 million). In Kent and Medway, 13.5% of the working age population are on universal credit, which is roughly the same as for the country as a whole.
“The numbers of people on universal credit went up by about two times in the first couple of weeks of the pandemic and they have stayed high, so the background here is real need,” says Taylor-Gooby. “I think we’ve kept pace but what has happened is that poverty has gone up.”
The charity noticed a spike in demand last autumn when the government withdrew the £20-a-week universal credit uplift, a move described as the largest ever overnight cut in benefits. This was a “double whammy” for households, suggests Connolly, because people “lost £20 plus the cost of living was going up”.
The charity has 100 bins dotted in local supermarkets, church halls and schools and these donation points used to deliver enough groceries to keep the shelves in its warehouse full. These days though, like on your supermarket shelves, there are gaps.
“It didn’t used to look like this, it used to be absolutely crammed full,” says Gardiner, pointing to areas of bare shelf. She estimates donations are half pre-pandemic levels. “There is a constant worry about whether we are going to have enough food to put in the parcels.”
“Everyone is feeling the pinch,” offers one of the volunteers busily organising its new stock deliveries. The food bank’s need to source large quantities of groceries from retailers and wholesalers brings with it new logistical challenges. Indeed Aldi is the only local supermarket willing to accept bulk orders.
We spent “virtually zilch” on food before the pandemic, explains Martin Ward, the charity’s chair of trustees. “There was this balance between what came in through the donation bins and what was going out.”
But those days are long gone and the numbers involved make uncomfortable reading for the charity. In the year to July 2019, it was spending about £500 a year on food, plugging shortages of milk and fruit juice, but by the following summer the upheaval caused by Covid helped that figure swell to £12,800. This year it has forecast that its food bill will come to about £35,000.
“We spent 10 times more in the first six weeks of the pandemic than we had done in the previous four years,” says Ward. “There has been a steady month-on-month increase … and now it is about £3,000.”
But can a small food bank, run by a handful of staff and nearly 200 volunteers, keep papering over widening social cracks? Last week Morgan Wild, head of policy at Citizens Advice, told MPs that demand for crisis support, including referrals for food banks, are at a record high, and that is before higher energy bill tariffs kick in.
In Whitstable, the charity’s finances have held up thanks to local generosity and other fundraising work, and to date it has been able to expand its service to meet the growing need on its doorstep. As Ward puts it: “We march forward in faith.”