The head of a child poverty charity has expressed her shock that an innovative service designed to help tackle food poverty in North Tyneside was oversubscribed within hours of being announced.
Surplus food distribution group The Bread and Butter Thing (TBBT) has opened its first centre at Family Gateway’s Howdon Community Hub in partnership with North Tyneside Council.
The project provides access to low-cost surplus food and staples. For just £7.50, TBBT members’ shopping bags can be filled with an average of £35 worth of items made up of quality, nutritious food.
Read more: Bills rising: Eight huge cost of living blows in force from April - everything you need to know
Within hours of the news being made public that TBBT was set to open its doors on April 1 in Howdon, 177 people had signed up for the 80 membership places available.
It follows a trend seen elsewhere in the North East at TBBT hubs. In Spennymoor, County Durham, the community food organisation which launched in Manchester in 2016, has 400 people signed up.
Julie Marriott, chief executive of Family Gateway, said she knew there would be a high demand for TBBT’s service given the help her own organisation had had to offer to families during the pandemic with free meals to keep children fed.
But she commented: “That was breath-taking in itself, but to then see this over-subscription of TBBT at this rate was a shock. We are going into the summer months, so my thinking as a chief executive is where are we going to be in six months' time? What is this going to look like?
“And to me the biggest impact will be around health and wellbeing with a society that is already weakened by the pandemic, where children’s ability to succeed is already reduced because their schooling has been interrupted, and if you then layer on a further period of poverty, it is quite a scary lens to look through.”
Julie - who says she is proud Family Gateway is helping deliver the new food service alongside TBBT and North Tyneside Council - is predicting the situation will only get worse as more individuals and families find themselves pushed into poverty on the back of last autumn’s £20 Universal Credit cut, and with food, fuel, energy bills and interest rates all on the rise.
She said: “We are now seeing poverty in many areas of our community where it was never seen before. We have seen people on furlough and we have seen people made redundant. The scaffolding that was holding many communities up has been reduced and is destabilised.
“For those that were already living in extreme poverty, of which we have a significant number in our area, rising energy costs – and we have heard this comment of ‘eat or heat’ before – is going to have a big impact.
“The launch of The Bread and Butter Thing is a solution and a reaction to what we know is coming our way, which is the real deep rooted problem of we don’t have enough food. We are seeing children going without food more than ever before.
“TBBT will provide a good three to four meals. For £7.50 a week people will go away with three bags. The fact that the service was oversubscribed so quickly demonstrates the fear that is within our community right now of families and those living alone as to how they are going to cope.”
Kelly Kerr, a mother of three from Wallsend, was one of those who availed herself of the new TBBT service on its opening day. She told ChronicleLive: “I think the idea is fantastic because I’m a working mother of three kids and my husband works his backside off, and everything has just shot up; National Insurance has gone up, taxes, gas and electric.
“I’ve got three children at home and it’s like trying to afford everything to be able to look after the kids as well. I feel we get more penalised by working than I would be if I was on benefits.”
Kelly had picked up three bags of shopping including cupboard staples, fresh vegetables and chilled items. She said: “It will keep us all going, and it’s quite good as the first bag is free so you kind of get a gist of what it’s all about.
“But it’s been overwhelming to be honest because there was only 80 people that are able to have the bags today, but I believe nearly 200 people have actually put themselves forward to have it. So you can see in the area it’s a massive demand, and it’s for people who are on benefits and those who are working and there’s no stigma between the both because we are all in the same boat.”
TBBT is already working with North Tyneside Council on further projects across the borough. Fiona Williams, TBBT's communications officer, said she can only see the situation becoming worse.
“If you think of 2021 across the year, we were getting 700 new members each month. But as soon as we got to October-November time when the Universal Credit uplift went, we were suddenly seeing 1,400 people joining us a month.
"Now we have hit 2022 and we are launching new projects, and all of them have already started at a really high level and have been oversubscribed. We do try to be scrupulously fair so we give people who don't get in one week the chance to get in the following."
She added that now April has arrived and the cost of living crisis intensifies with households seeing the biggest rise in energy prices in living memory, "we are absolutely expecting things to get worse. We are trying to work with council partners to make sure we get into as many areas as we can.
"People are facing a whole catalogue of issues that are making life very, very difficult."
