Foodbanks are “deeply worried” about the winter as the cost-of-living crisis combines with plunging temperatures to hammer family budgets, a charity chief has warned.
Writing in the programme for a Trussell Trust Christmas service, charity chief executive Emma Revie warned: “More and more people are being forced into impossible decisions, like heating their homes or feeding their children.
“Foodbanks in the Trussell Trust network are telling us that they are deeply worried about what’s to come.”
The Mirror told last month how the charity distributed 11.5 million meals in just six months as hungry households battled the cost-of-living crisis.
The organisation gave away 1,281,148 emergency parcels between April and the end of September.
Each contained enough food for three meals a day for three days - meaning 11,530,332 meals were provided.
The figure rocketed by 32% compared with the same period last year and by 52% compared with April to September 2019 - before the coronavirus pandemic.
Addressing the Southwark Cathedral congregation, which included Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee chairman Stephen Timms, Lib Dem MP Wendy Chamberlain and Labour ’s Barbara Keeley, Ms Revie said the last year had been “deeply troubling”.
She added: “Our country has been hit by a perfect storm - rising energy prices, rising inflation, a potential recession - which is just forcing more and more people deeper into poverty.
“The soaring cost of living is driving a tsunami of need to our foodbanks.”
But she insisted the charity was “stubborn in our belief that things do not have to be this way, that things can change”.
She added: “We are stubborn in our belief that together we can reach a future where no-one needs to use a foodbank because no-one will allow this.”
Paying tribute to the charity, Dean of Southwark Andrew Nunn said volunteers had helped “those suffering as a consequence of the cost of food, the cost of living - something which we fear will only get worse”.
Recalling how he helped at a foodbank in the US in 1994, he told worshippers: “The parish I was in was in Camden on the other bank of the Delaware River from the bright lights of Philadelphia.
“We ran a foodbank twice a week from the church and a breakfast programme each Sunday morning - the queue was round the block.
“I thought it was a scandal that in the wealthiest city in the world in sight of the city of brotherly love people were going hungry.
“I still think it is a scandal, but now it is a feature of our lives.”
He told Trussell Trust volunteers: “How I wish you didn’t exist – but thank God you do.”
