Just over a decade ago, I was in Downing Street planning our country’s pathway through the global financial crisis, completing our long-planned exit from Iraq, anguishing over soldiers’ deaths in Afghanistan and implementing the second stage of the Good Friday agreement on policing in Northern Ireland. I never once imagined that, just over a dozen years on, I would be having to negotiate a supply of 1.5m toilet rolls for my local family centre’s anti-poverty work.
And because 2023 finds mothers reusing nappies, sharing toothbrushes, going without period products, washing their clothes without washing powder and washing themselves and their children without soap, next week fellow helpers and I have set ourselves the task of securing all these essential toiletry products for families in need.
These are the latest supplies being added to the 600,000 surplus goods (worth around £10m) that 30,000 families have so far received from the new multibank that volunteers have created in Fife, where I live. Helping the hungry is the life-saving work of food banks, now more than 3,000 in number, alongside the growing number of community kitchens, pantries and larders. But now communities need not only a local food bank but a multibank – a bedding, furnishings, toiletry, clothes and baby bank all rolled into one. The biggest demand over the winter has been for duvets, blankets and sheets to keep people warm and given to our multibank by Amazon, Fishers laundry, Scotmid and the Textile Services Association. As spring moves to summer, these founding corporate donors are being joined by Tesco and the Online Home Shop, which are donating clothes and homemaking goods, tins of food from Morrisons, PepsiCo, Scotmid and Heinz, toiletries from Accrol and Unilever, paint from local suppliers, and we are now about to receive mattresses thanks to Whitbread. This is the kind of distribution revolution we need for the urgent relief of the poverty in our midst.
After last month’s punishing rise in food price inflation, telecoms, council tax and other prices, hardship – and the requirement to relieve it – is not diminishing but increasing. For sadly, under this government, coronation Britain is also a divided Britain, a country in which, with every month that passes, the poor are becoming even poorer.
The fanfare for a king cannot obscure what is unfair for others – rising deprivation among those without money or power. Regrettably, too, the national mood seems different from the last coronation. After years of wartime and postwar austerity, the British public of 1953 was optimistic about the future. This time, as charities take over from the welfare state as our national safety net and the food bank, not the social security system, is fast becoming the last line of defence against destitution, it is difficult not to fear for the future.
“The record is clear,” declared an in-denial Rishi Sunak in a prime minister’s questions answer to Keir Starmer a few days ago. “The number of people in poverty is lower.” The most generous way to explain his interpretation of the data is that he is looking at charts upside down, for the official government statistics actually show that last year there were 14.4 million people living in poverty, 1.4 million more than in 2010-11.
To call his claims fake news elevates what he is saying to what Churchill once called “a terminological inexactitude” – a more worrying kind of misinformation designed to mislead the public about the kind of society we are becoming. And when this erroneous claim of declining poverty is born of complacency, ignorance becomes a form of arrogance. Child poverty is now rising inexorably to 4.2 million children and soon it could entrap a record 5 million children, so we should be debating solutions to the problems we face, not denying there is a problem, and these grim statistics explain why 2.1 million people are using food banks and why most poor children are in families on low pay, with this decade 1.5 million more working households unable to make ends meet even after working all hours God has given them.
I’m talking to mothers who can’t sleep at night because they are worried sick about not having breakfast for their children before they go to school and who are ashamed they have to queue to use food banks. There are some images that never leave you. Images that are so haunting they encapsulate the trials and tribulations of the times we are in: the story of a 10-year-old sleeping on bare floorboards with only a threadbare sheet covering him; of a mother feeding her children at the expense of herself and relying only on leftovers, trying to sleep through her hunger; of a single father who says he can’t cope any more, dumping his 16-year-old son in floods of tears at a charity warehouse – leaving the desolate young boy to the compassion of staff and later the mercy of a care home.
These are real-life tragedies that capture a poverty that seems even worse and much more entrenched than what I saw growing up in a mining and textiles town, at a time when slum housing was still rife and the children of travelling people regularly turned up at my school ill-clad and dishevelled, in poorly fitting, secondhand clothes.
It is because this new face of poverty in our Carolean era recalls the Victorian age of a century and a half ago – more so than the Elizabethan one we have just left behind – that more than a hundred public figures led by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Trussell Trust have pleaded that the government introduce a new anti-destitution guarantee that it will meet the cost of basic essentials to end the growing reliance on charity for food. The Cottage Family Centre in my own community recently came across four children who took it in turns, one night in every four, to sleep on a threadbare secondhand settee. The family had not one bed to their name. Some time ago, a Leeds teacher was so shocked to see her kids falling asleep in her classroom that she began collecting beds for the children in her care. The “right to a bed” campaign that she inspired has given birth to bedding banks all over the country. When rising energy and food prices are not the fault of the millions in poverty, we have to take the shame out of need. To meet this new epidemic of rising poverty, we have no alternative but to launch a nationwide appeal with a view to uniting the country around the immediate relief of poverty.
This week a pamphlet, The Multibank and How to Create One, will set out the Fife experiment, which is already being replicated by The Brick by Brick project in Greater Manchester. The multibank is a very simple idea: to connect the companies that have surplus goods that people need to the charities, social workers, teachers and health visitors who know the people who urgently need the goods.
We are now asking retailers and supermarket chains to donate their surplus goods, informing them that, instead of destroying leftovers, they can join an anti-pollution initiative that transfers their goods to families in need and helps create a circular economy. And we are asking manufacturers to do special production-line runs of essential products at cost price, reminding them that the recipients will be families who cannot afford to buy their goods this year or next but may be their customers in the future.
I want churches, community groups, charities, councillors and companies who have all shown great concern about this new epidemic of poverty in our midst to come together in a new UK-wide coalition of compassion.
To his credit, King Charles has called for today and bank holiday Monday to be The Big Help Out, a day of community volunteering as a lasting legacy of his ascension to the throne. If we all travel under the same banner of a poverty-free Britain, the irresistible force of public pressure can defeat a currently immovable object of demeaning poverty, and begin to change post-coronation Britain for the better.
• Gordon Brown was prime minister from 2007 to 2010
