140 councils ‘using funds to subsidise food banks’

The local authorities have used £2.9m of public money to help combat food poverty, according to BBC Panorama.

While the Government says food banks are not part of the welfare system, the programme asked all 375 councils in England and Wales about food banks and 323 responded, and of those, 140 said they were providing funding.

Most councils were covering management, administration or accommodation costs for food banks, while some were paying for the food itself, last night’s programme found.

In Derbyshire, the county council said its most pressing public health concern used to be healthy eating, but food poverty has overtaken it.

The council has just invested £126,000 from its public health budget into food banks.

Julie Hirst, public health specialist at Derbyshire County Council, told Panorama: “It’s now become an issue of food poverty and some people in the country are not being able to eat at all and if people can’t eat at all, what’s the point in trying to get them to eat healthily?”

Professor Liz Dowler, a food policy expert from the University of Warwick and one of the authors of a recent Government-commissioned report about food aid, said food banks are “an inadequate plaster over a gaping wound”.

She added: “They do not solve the problems. And that they should be enshrined as an inadequate solution is deeply immoral.”

Panorama found that over the last two years two councils covering the constituency of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith have between them committed almost £70,000 to combat food poverty.

The Department for Work and Pensions told Panorama that there was “no robust evidence that welfare reforms are linked to increased use of food banks”.