Kids going hungry have been playing pretty big in the news
over the last week thanks to yet another in depth report into the country’s
seemingly inevitable slide down the pan. I can’t remember the exact stat. It
was scary. Stats are always scary these days. I suppose we should be thankful
that the measure of hunger amongst British kids at the moment is a youngster
showing up at school with no breakfast inside them and maybe no meal the night
before either. I guess families would jump at that in the baked out dying
fields of the Horn of Africa. Many Greek families would probably see this level
of hunger as being not so bad really. Even the States are further down the road
to the kind of pot bellied hunger we have always associated with the Third World . I podcasted a Radio 4 thing about American
hunger a few months ago. They did an interview with some kids in a tough area
who were pretty well subsisting on school food. One little girl of about six
who had the saddest, quietest voice you have ever heard was asked how bad
things were at home. At first she just couldn’t say it. Then she got it out.
Almost inaudible. “My mummy ate a rat.”
“My mummy ate a rat.”
So, yeah. We’ve got a way to go yet.
We got some good news at First Base last week. An outfit
called ‘Cash for Kids’ said yes to our request for funding for 100 emergency
food parcels for families. It seems that the award will be timely. Every week
we are seeing more and more families coming in who are in no position to buy
any food. They come from the Social and Women’s Aid and Welfare Rights and
Citizen’s Advice and almost inevitably they are horribly embarrassed that
things have come to this.
The stories are seldom the same. Sometimes it is down to a
late night escape from domestic abuse. Sometimes it is a lost job or a cut in
hours. A mess up with benefits. A chop in tax credit. All sorts. And when a
family of three or four come through the door with pockets as empty as a
banker’s soul it needs rather more than one basic food parcel to keep them
going for two or three days.
Well thanks to Cash for Kids we are now in a position to
cover things for the next hundred families through the door.
Maybe it is worth listing what we can do with £1000 to help
out a hundred families. We aim to put them in a place where they can feed up to
four people for three days. In some ways,
some might be surprised at how far you can get with £13.34. Actually that isn’t
quite right. Our family parcel includes three loaves of bread which we don’t
have to pay for thanks to the generosity of Greggs the Bakers who donate us 50
loaves every week – an absolute complete and utter Godsend. Let’s call it £15 –
a fiver a day.
Day 1
Breakfast Cereal, Toast, Butter and Jam
Lunch Beans on toast
Snack Crisps + a banana
Dinner Savoury Rice and Sweet and Sour
sauce
Strawberry
Whip + tinned peaches
Before bed Biscuits + a drink (Tea or blackcurrant
cordial)
Day 2
Breakfast Cereal, Toast, Butter and Jam
Lunch Hot dog sausages + Instant Mashed Potatoes
Snack Jam sandwich
Dinner Pasta + Bolognese sauce
Rice
Pudding
Before bed Biscuits + a drink (Tea or blackcurrant
cordial)
Day 3
Breakfast Cereal, Toast, Butter and Jam
Lunch Tinned spaghetti on toast
Snack Biscuits
Dinner Pasta and Tinned Meatballs
Sponge
cake and Custard
Before bed Biscuits + a drink (Tea or blackcurrant
cordial)
Not bad for a fiver a day. Well it
is the best we can come up with. And this of course begs a few questions, many
of which seem to be getting asked on a pretty regular basis on the phone in
shows. Basically the big ask of the day is who can’t find a fiver a day? Is it
the unemployed family of four who are on benefits? Probably not. Assuming they
are in social housing they will be getting all the rent and rates covered by
housing benefits. In terms of cash they will have somewhere in the region of
£150 a week coming in. Not enough for a month in Barbados but enough to have
£115 a week leftover for electric, clothes etc having spend a fiver a day on
food. It seems that most of the families who lack even a fiver a day to pay for
food tend to be working. They have Northern Rock 120% mortgages taken on a few
years ago and equity that has gone negative. They have maxed up credit cards
and debt collectors are on the phone all day, every day. The calculations they
used to decide the mortgage was affordable have all gone wrong. The husband
might have banked on a certain amount of overtime which has now disappeared. The
wife might have budgeted for Tax Credits based on a certain number of hours a
week of work which seemed a shoe in at the time but now have become a pipe
dream. The electric and petrol bills have shot through the roof and the bank of
mum and dad has run out of cash. All of which sends them through the doors of
the Social or Welfare Rights or Citizens Advice in a state of shame and
embarrassment. And then they come in to us.
Maybe yet again we are missing the
real story. The very poorest among us seem to be the ones who have jobs which
need cars and mortgages which seemed like a good idea at the time. The victims
of Brown’s ‘No more boom and bust’ claptrap. They are ones who time has caught
up with. Just like the whole country really. And will we be seeing more and
more in the months and years to come? Oh yeah. Things at the moment have a
horrible tip of the iceberg feel about them.
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