General Chat

A basic of life out of reach :-|

we have old age pensioners, families, refugees, young men and women, and street people using them .......... it seems that even middle-class folk can have problems these days.

Not to mention the food that schools are providing ...... not only breakfast and lunches but also packing backpacks with food for the kids to take home at the weekend to make sure the kids have something to eat.

It's tragic, isn't it?
Even student nurses are using them.

When our town's food bank opened a few years ago they had more volunteers than clients and were over stocked with donations.

Now they are constantly 'begging' for donations as they are having difficulty keeping up with the demand on the service.

Sad times :-(

Chris

Allan ........... that's exactly what happens here.

The Vancouver Food Bank now holds a "Christmas in July" event, mainly to publicize that donations are needed all year round.

Same here in Oz, Sylvia, and the Salvo's have just had their 'Give a Damn, Give a Can' day which is an annual event.

All other Food Banks rely on ongoing contributions throughout the year :-(

Dermot .......

not just the UK!

it's all over the world

They began here as a temporary way to help during the economic crisis in the 1981/82

The intention was to be a temporary social services helper.

What happened??

Fund raisers were held, and government officials of all levels turned up to proudly present cheques to "help", got lots of praise and applause for that, but they then did nothing to increase welfare rates, funding, social services, etc.


Now it seems that maintaining food banks is still the job of ordinary citizens. :-|

Food banks were once considered as a passing phase but they appear to have become an embarrassing & an established part of the today's UK welfare state.

Do you have some plans that are better Bob? if so do tell. Or perhaps send them in a brown envelope to ALL the political parties who could work together on a solution?

I don't care which party 'fixes it' or at least tries to, as long as someone does.

I don't care that it's the Methodists here that open their doors, or the bearded Bros in Birmingham that run a food bank, or the Sally army or whoever. Someone has to do something.

"...Labour has plans for fixing this..." Like they did between 1997 and 2010 I presume.

Nyx .............

it's much more organised than that here, at least now.

Food banks started the way you describe, volunteers in the church basement.

But now every province seems to have an organised group that pulls in all the food banks under its wing, eg foodbank-bc, foodbank-ns

Foodbank-bc has 100 individual food banks across the province under its purview; f00dbank-ns has 146, and so it goes.

The oversight group and the individual food banks are all non-profit organisations, which means they can give tax receipts for donations. In BC, all the food banks seem to have a paid director, with volunteers helping in the warehouses or at distribution time. It's all very organised.

It could be any of us.

Not related to benefits as such, but just talking to a pensioner who is probably more fortunate than many financially, but still in the space of a few weeks has had to have a new boiler, house insurance renewal, etc totalling many hundreds of pounds. Throw that at someone already struggling and it would easily become the straw that broke the camel's back.

I'm just looking at some articles on the local food banks, they are for the most part just the straight statistics supplied by the people who volunteer, ( in the closest one to me it's the church hall staff /volunteers who take collections, and give the food out ). Locals who help other locals in need. And not just food but access to internet, someone to direct people who need help with housing , mental health support etc,

We're not talking living it large food wise either, beans, pasta , soup, bread, UHT milk (yuk!) rice, cereals. Toilet rolls and toothpaste.

A comment, which is anonymous so I think ok to post

"“We would like to thank you all, you made life bearable when we thought we were a lost cause whether that was a cup of tea, a hug, a smile and some friendly company.

Of course the food parcels helped our family more than anyone could believe but it was the kind hearted team that made the biggest impact to our lives.

Our financial difficulties are solved for the time being and we’d like to give something back by volunteering and donating something back”

I listen mainly to our national broadcasting radio station, the CBC ....... one of the reasons (not the main one) is that there are no ads on their radio stations across the country, although CBC tv stations do carry ads

CBC radio stations across Canada run a Food Bank Day before Christmas, each province organises its own. The CBC in BC 31st Annual Food Bank Day will be held this coming Friday, replacing all normal broadcasting from 5:30-8:30am and then from noon to 6:00pm, all programming will come from the station in Vancouver, a mix of information on food banks, people who depend on them, music interludes, expensive offers free to someone who donates xx$, and so on.

Among the people interviewed will be people such as Nyx has just mentioned ............ the full time worker who got injured and eventually ran out of money, seniors who just do not have enough money to survive, even with a pension. It should be noted that these seniors now who are depending on the food bank and even becoming homeless are mainly women who married in the 50s and 60s when wives stayed home and their husbands took care of all the finances.

I don't know about the UK, but a woman who never worked gets a very limited widows pension and a small OAS (Old Age Security). People have to have worked full time to get the full OAS and to have contributed from their wages to get the CPP (Canada Pension Plan). There is another income seniors can apply for, based on a means test of their income the previous year, known as GAIN ....... but even that doesn't bring a low income senior anywhere close to the $20,000 annual income that is considered the poverty level.


I heard a promo for this day earlier this morning .......... there are now 100 food banks across BC, and the arrangement is that any money donated by a listerner in a place where there is a food bank will go to that food bank OR a donor can designate a particular food bank. Nova Scotia has 146 Food Banks spread across a much smaller geographical area, but the income levels have always been much lower in the maritime provinces.

One other interesting that emerged was that one food bank director in the metro area said that she could buy $6 of veggies with every $1 donated

If you're not good with money when it comes in weekly or fortnightly , a monthly payment is not going to make you better at managing is it? It just builds up a cycle of boom and bust I think, 'hooray there is a load of money in today' but instead of having to sort it out to last the week, it now has to last the month. Easy if you're good at that, not so if you're not.

When you look at the broader picture of how some people NOT on benefits but on more-than-adequate wages manage their money, loading debt on to credit cards, it's not surprising that if you're just not good with money that's how it's likely to stay. Don't we all know someone who stacks up their bills in a drawer or behind the clock? Out of sight out of mind.

The other aspect of that is that when the 'threatening' bills come, the ones that you get phone calls about, people panic and pay them first...leaving the actual essential bills unpaid.

Another thing is that people who have little money are also often the ones paying the most, for instance a pensioner I know who has to pay for electric on a card meter, who has to pay for carers, whose landlord will not do repairs (so to keep warm is even more expensive).

If you are old and sick or just poor and/or not good with money it's truly hard, and the harder it gets the less you can cope with it. You get in a downward spiral, not always of your own making, and it's hard to climb out of. it's not always the big things like divorce/illness/ losing a job that tip people over from 'managing' to 'not managing', it can be a vets bill, or the boiler dying in the middle of winter. You don't have to be feckless to get into difficulties

but I digress lol, (I think that will be on my tombstone ;-) ).

Channel 5 and its mates will have you believe that it is very common for people who rent to be feckless with a tendency to trash their homes. Nothing could be further from the truth - if such behaviour were typical it would be impossible for the landlord to get insurance and the whole industry would collapse.

It is certainly true that most households drawing benefits (inc old age pension) are for the most part financially stressed and often face inviduous choices such as pay the rent or put the heating on rather than shall we paint the town red tonight.

The weeks of delay involved in granting UC - even for people already on the old system - does not help of course. Neither does the absurd cap in London which is having the effect of forcing Londoners out of a city their ancestors have lived in for centuries - including the blitz. And then there are the sudden suspensions of benefits for all kinds of allegations most iof which are withdrawn but only after much damage is done.

The whole sorry mess, taking into account the time and effort taken to implement the computer system and in manpower since it has gone live will not even save any money quite the opposite. It does not help employers either.

UC simply put is class warfare on the old, the disabled, the poor, the out of work, victims of circumstance, many ex-soldiers and pretty well anybody down on their luck.

On the tin it says that UC will help build a bright new future. Piffle.
,
Not all Tory voters are well off by a long stretch. It will be interesting to see how loyal their vote remains after a year or two on UC ( or not ).

One of the worst moves was getting rid of direct payments from benefits to landlords for rent. In addition to the difficulties mentioned, some people simply cannot manage their money and will spend it as soon as they get it, not always on debts and necessities either. Drugs and/or alcohol and/or fags or gambling or simply having a good time are the priority for some. Whereas direct payments gave landlords some certainty of at least getting the rent due when tenants left (after trashing the place causing thousands of pounds worth of damage in some cases), now they must spend more time and money chasing money owed, which doesn't help keep rents down for those that do pay their rents.

The problem is, Universal Credit is, allegedly, a 'one size fits all' system.
Unfortunately, People are all different , as are their situations.

Rollo

I agree entirely on all points, except that currently on the old system (for areas that haven't switched to UC) the working hour expectation for disabled is 16 hours not 12.

I've come into contact with so many people who neither have access to the internet or knowledge of how to use it if they did, whether that's to job search or to fill in any claim forms which are often so daft and do not 'fit' the very specific situation someone might be in when applying.

UC 'should' have been a great opportunity to cut down on the having to contact this dept and that, DWP, council etc etc, and use technology to make getting the right benefits to the right people much easier and quicker. it doesn't.

As for Vivaldi...I've gone right off him lol.

This is in no way a political comment, my politics are my own business, but an observation of my own.

I live in a village which has changed beyond recognition in the last thirty years. When I was growing up there were farm workers and ordinary young working families employed in horticulture, living in farm cottages and council houses in the village.The very successful horticultural co-operative was deemed to be a quango and sold to individuals who were never able to organize their marketing as well and sold up to move on. The council houses and farm cottages that had been adequate for generations to bring up fair sized families in were sold as well

Rural wages are low so the cost of living must be of a similar standard. People who had bought properties at a discount in London were, of course, able to buy better properties at local rates and they did, sometimes two to knock together.

Family homes that housed the next generation have been bought, usually by older couples, who then knock two into one or add large extensions.The local young people will never be able to afford to live in those properties again, driven out by people who really are not rurally inclined and have now taken to building industrial type fencing around their properties..

Political instability & general ambiguity do not help to reassure or give some future hope to the downtrodden electorate.

Hang on till Brexit is accomplished & everything will then be fine & glorious.