November 2020
Covid-19 crisis pushing middle income families to food bank help.
Food aid charities have identified a new cohort of food bank users who previously held good jobs and enjoyed comfortable incomes but are now claiming welfare benefits for the first time. Members of the Feeding Britain and Independent Food Network say they are now seeing people with mortgages and cars who own businesses or are self employed but have been tipped into crisis due to gaps in the social security system.
Before Covid, research suggests that the vast majority of food bank users were destitute, however this has now widened. The phenomenon of the so-called ‘newly hungry’ is revealed as Feeding Britain’s network of charities reported massive increases in the amount of food aid they had given out since March