The manager of a Welsh food bank claims the cost-of-living crisis has become so severe that people are turning up in suits to receive emergency parcels. Reverend Dean Roberts, who runs Caerphilly-based charity The Parish Trust, said he has seen queues "down the street" for support with some brought to tears as a result of their financial and emotional hardship.
Speaking on the Sunday programme on Radio 4, Rev Roberts said he had seen a huge increase in the number of people requesting food parcels in his community for the first time. "Prior to maybe a month or so ago, we had a lot of regulars who were coming to us because of the furlough scheme, Covid, that sort of thing. But now we're starting to see more and more people from a wider cross-section of society coming to ask for help and it's quite worrying."
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Rev Roberts said The Parish Trust, based out of St Thomas' Church, Trethomas, is carrying out far more than just food distribution. He explained: "We started out in the pandemic doing practical things to alleviate some of their worries, but now we're doing all sorts of things such as courses, clubs, we're liaising, we're signposting.
"Only a few weeks ago I was running round to a single parent who had fled a terrible situation and had absolutely nothing in the house with a with a little baby as well. We're just finding that we're fighting fires."
He added that the charity itself is close to breaking point as it cannot manage its own rising living costs. "Our bills are increasing and we're trying to still maintain that level of service to everybody without having to say no to somebody. Therefore we relying more and more on the general public to help us in whatever way they can and it is proving really difficult.
"We have a backlog, sadly, of families that we're needing to help which could consist of hundreds of people, many of whom are children."
Rev Roberts said more people were being plunged into poverty and added: "We'll have people who come who have partners, they're both working full-time and they come in suits with their briefcase and to ask for help from us or to buy something called Bag a Bargain which we run, which is like a step on the road towards requesting a food parcel.
"We're seeing that more and more people queuing down the street, people crying because they they don't know how long they'll be able to afford the £2.50 Bag a Bargain that we provide."
According to the Trussell Trust, more than 2.1 million food parcels have been sent out in the last year across the UK. That's a 14% increase on the last two years - and more than 800,000 of those parcels were for children. The trust has joined forces with the Bishop of Durham to urge the UK Government to take immediate action to strengthen the social security system so that it keeps up with the true cost of living.
