Town hall chiefs to tell Westminster of concerns over level of foodbank use
COUNCIL bosses will write to the Government over concerns about the growing reliance on food banks in East Lancashire.
Councillor Noordad Aziz proposed a motion to the recent full council meeting in Hyndburn asking his colleagues to consider penning a letter raising the seriousness of the issue with bosses in Westminster.
Across Lancashire, 11,587 parcels were handed out by charity The Trussell Trust between April and September 2019. This is an increase of more than 8.5per cent from the same six-month period in 2018 – which totalled 10,582.
Coun Aziz said: “The United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, states that ‘the right to adequate food is indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfilment of other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights’.
“It further affirms that ‘states have a core obligation to take the necessary action to mitigate and alleviate hunger’.
“In 2009 there were 20 Trussell Trust food banks in the UK. Now there are 428, operating out of
2,000 distribution centres, plus over 800 independent food banks.
“From April 2018 to
March 2019 the Trussell Trust gave out a record
1.6 million emergency food parcels to people in crisis. 3m children are at risk of hunger during the school holidays.
“Nearly one in five children under 15 lives in a home where their parents cannot afford to put food on the table, according to a report by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.
“Around 10pc of the NHS budget goes on treating type 2 diabetes and up to 1 million people live in food deserts in the UK. The Conservative
Government has utterly failed to respond to the growth of food poverty since 2010 especially in deprived boroughs like Hyndburn and areas like East Lancashire.”
At the meeting, councillors backed Coun Aziz’s proposal to write to the Government and ask them to tackle the issue of food poverty, as well as give local councils resources to address the issue.
Foodbanks work with people such as doctors, health visitors, social workers and police to identify people in crisis and issue them with a foodbank voucher. People then bring their voucher to a foodbank centre where it can be redeemed for three days’ emergency food.