The Guardian ran a very moving article about how young people in Liverpool are relying on their own food bank (Food bank opens for young people hit by benefit sanctions, Report, 10 December). At the end of the article the Department for Work and Pensions is quoted as saying that it’s “misleading to link food bank use to benefit delays and sanctions”. Just what planet are they living on? The Trussell Trust has been asking people about their reasons for relying on food banks for years now. The most common reason by far, accounting for almost one-third of all food bank users, is that their benefits have been delayed. More than 80% of food banks have said that the new sanctions regime, which the Tories introduced in 2012, has increased the number of people in need of their help. The implication of the DWP’s extraordinary statement is that food bank users and staff are lying. We may be getting used to the government’s wilful blindness to the consequences of their policies. But this is surely a new low.
Emily Thornberry MP
Labour, Islington South and Finsbury, shadow minister for employment
• The report of the all-party parliamentary group on hunger, A route map out of hunger as we know it in the United Kingdom, sets out a vital programme of first aid for an appalling situation that should never have been allowed by parliament to develop, but it is no route map out of hunger. The APPG should set about addressing the root causes of hunger. Whether or not the poorest families and individuals who rent their homes have enough money to buy food, fuel, clothes, transport and other necessities is being determined by the national and global free market in finance, grabbing land in the UK which is in limited supply, forcing up house prices and rents.
The issue is whether the all-party group understands that hunger can only increase for tenants while the incomes they need for food are squeezed between a global financial sector forcing rents upwards and a government shredding their capacity to pay those rents by cutting benefits.
Rev Paul Nicolson
London
• At the end of this week, the children we will soon see on holiday in our frosty streets include those who rely on free lunchtime meals. A good number of them will lose weight as a valued source of nutrition is closed off during the 12 days of Christmas. Scrooge is at large during our festival of giving and receiving; we are him and he is all of us. Or shall we do better?
Professor Craig Richardson
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire
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