British prime minister David Cameron trumpeted "Big Society" in his early days in 10 Downing Street. These days it is little mentioned in Conservative circles. For many the idea that higher voluntary contributions by the public could be used to repair or ease society's ills more effectively was difficult to grasp.
For many of those who did grasp it, it was repugnant since it was taken as evidence of a philosophical attempt by Cameron to “roll back the state”.
Big society has grown – just not in the way that Cameron had intended.
The Trussell Trust, which is staffed mostly by volunteers, has fed nearly one million people at 420 food banks in the United Kingdom.
Today the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby launches a report drafted by a cross-party group of MPs: Feeding Britain: A blueprint for abolishing hunger in the UK.
Hunger, however, is not just about the lack of food. It is also about economic trends.
Inflation in the UK has risen by 30 per cent since 2003. Food inflation, however, has jumped 47 per cent.
The price of electricity, gas and other fuels rose by 153 per cent. In every category, the rises were higher in the UK than elsewhere.
However, the UK has had the lowest wage rises: increasing by 28 per cent in the decade from 2003.
Meanwhile, its poorest fifth are poorer than those elsewhere by £2,000 (€2,536) a year on average.
Family income
Looking further back, the MPs’ report found that the share of family income spent on utility bills dropped from 5.2 per cent in 1953 to 3 per cent in 2003.
Food bills consumed a third of income in the 1950s but just 16 per cent in 2003. Housing, however, costs a family nearly double: from 8 per cent in 1953 to 17 per cent in 2003.
In all, however, the share of income spent on keeping fed and warm dropped by roughly a quarter in five decades.
Since 2004, however, the graph has gone the other way. Energy bills have nearly doubled. In all, the basics for living are now nearly 5 per cent more expensive in real terms than a decade ago.
But the costs faced by the poorest fifth are worst of all, up by nearly a quarter, according to the report that will be launched in the House of Commons today.
In summary, it demands that the state get more involved in feeding its people, along with bringing about the “end of the scandal of the subsidised destruction of edible food”.
Wasted food
The UK food industry wastes 4.3 million tonnes of food every year. Just 2 per cent of food deemed as waste that could be used by charities finds its way to them.
“Our anger knows no bounds that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of perfectly edible food, which is euphemistically termed ‘surplus’, is destroyed at a substantial cost, when it, alone, could eliminate hunger in our society,” the MPs say in the report.
Families scrimp on food to pay utilities, opting to get a food parcel from the Trussell Trust.
“No authority sends anyone to prison for being hungry and, in order to prevent a court-directed eviction for rent arrears, or a court order to cut off their utility supplies, many families go without food and therefore see food banks as reintroducing that buffer in their finances which many have lost.”
Credit rules must be changed to ensure that the poor do not pay for more pay-as-you-go mobile phones, or for pre-paid electricity and gas.
In a foreword to the report the Church of England Bishop of Truro Tim Thornton, who co-chaired the parliamentary committee, speaks of the way in which community ties between families and friends are weakening.
The rise in the use of food banks is evidence of that: “To use shorthand, the glue that once held us together and gave life to our communities has gone,” he says.
However, the food banks are evidence of people’s need to give also.
Some volunteers had faith, others had not, he says in the report. “But for all of these people we met, their morality is expressed in their helping of others.”
