1 in 10 Parents Now Expecting to Use Food Banks

As many as 10 per cent of parents in the UK are expecting that they will need to use a food bank within the next three months.

That’s according to research carried out recently on behalf of the food bank charity the Trussell Trust and the food delivery firm Deliveroo.

Those two organisations are joining forces in a project designed to deliver two million meals to people dealing with poverty and hunger across the country.

Emma Revie, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, has said that “everyone should be able to afford their own food” but made clear that her charity is facing a significant increase in demand from struggling households.

The increase is being attributed largely to the rising costs of living, with food costs and energy prices having gone up sharply in 2022.

“Families face the biggest income squeeze in a generation,” said Ms Revie. “People are telling us they’re having to make impossible decisions between heating and eating and being forced to turn to food banks to feed themselves.”

In the year between April 2020 and March 2021, the Trussell Trust distributed an estimated 2.5 million emergency food parcels across all regions of the UK, which was a record for a 12-month period.

The charity’s latest figures suggest that roughly 1.3 million parents will need to use a food bank within the next three months because they’ve run out of money and have no other access to food.

Meanwhile, financial pressures are currently such across the country that almost a third of parents are understood to have recently skipped at least one meal to help cover some other costs.

Steep increases in the prices associated with gas and electricity supplies have also left many thousands of parents deciding that they can no longer afford to cook their food because their energy bills are so high.

Ms Revie from the Trussell Trust has said she expects to see her charity’s new partnership with Deliveroo getting food parcels out to thousands more people in crisis in the coming months.

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