Foodbank fracas – election candidates clash over their proliferation during Tory years

By Charlotte Lilywhite, Local Democracy Reporter

Parliamentary candidates for Tooting clashed over ending the use of food banks at an election hustings this week, after the Conservative hopeful claimed they have always existed.

Ethan Brooks, a Wandsworth councillor, also partly blamed the rise in use of food banks on job centres signposting people to the support they offer, at the debate on June 24.

But Sarah Chapman, advocacy and communications manager at Wandsworth Foodbank, said the food bank was set up in 2013 as there were not any in the area.

She added it has seen a 400 per cent increase in need since, and that job centres no longer signpost people to food banks at all.

The comments came during a hustings for the Tooting parliamentary candidates in which Labour’s Rosena Allin-Khan, who was elected as MP for the constituency in 2016, also attended, along with the Lib Dems’ Judith Trounson and Green Party’s Nick Humberstone.

The hustings was held at All Saints Church in Tooting by the Balham and Tooting Community Association.

Ms Chapman told the candidates Wandsworth Foodbank gave more than 11,000 food parcels to people ‘in severe hardship whose income didn’t cover the cost of essentials like food’ last year, before asking what their party would do to ‘reduce current levels of hardship and end the need for food banks’.

Conservative Mr Brooks said: “There’s always been food banks, they’re not new. One reason we saw an increase in use of food banks was that in 2010, for the first time, Jobcentres started signposting people towards them, as they did start signposting people towards all sorts of support they could get before.”

But Ms Chapman said: “[There was] no food bank that I know of in Wandsworth before 2013, which was why we set up Wandsworth Foodbank, and since then there’s been lots more like the great Tooting Community Kitchen.

“We’ve seen a 400 per cent increase in need since 2013 and the Jobcentre became quite a large part of that before they stopped [signposting people to food banks] at all. Actually most of our referrals come from advice agencies, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, children’s centres.”

The Trussell Trust opened its first UK food bank in Salisbury in 2000 and had grown to around 35 food banks by 2010. It now runs a network of more than 1,300 food banks across the UK, including Wandsworth Foodbank.

The audience applauded Ms Trounson, who volunteers at a local food bank, when she hit back at Mr Brooks’ comments, saying: “No, there has not always been food banks.

“There have been food banks before the Conservative party [came] to power, but there is a lot more of them right now and by a lot more I mean an order of magnitude more.”

She called for fairer wages, improvements to the benefits system and the extension of free school meals to all primary school children to help tackle the issue.

Green candidate Mr Humberstone also slammed having a single food bank in the country as a ‘disgrace’ and said the Greens would introduce a £15 minimum wage for working people, end the ‘cruel’ five-week wait for benefits, increase Universal Credit by £40 a week, uplift disability benefits and scrap the two-child benefit cap.

Ms Allin-Khan, who works regular shifts at A&E, said many people are left needing to use food banks due to a ‘failure of the benefits system’, along with the cost-of-living crisis, and that existing inequalities must be narrowed to address this.

She said: “If you have poor-quality housing, no access to the employment market, all of those things mean that you end up like my patients in A&E who can’t afford to put the heating on and you see the elderly community with burns and scalds and their skin [coming] off because they’ve had to use an old, mouldy water bottle.”

The candidates also answered questions on topics including the NHS, housing, climate change, Brexit and supporting Tooting town centre. Andrew Price, from Reform UK, was invited but did not attend the debate.

The Workers Party’s Tarik Hussain, Rejoin EU’s Jas Alduk and Independent Davinder Singh Jamus were not invited but are also standing for the seat.

Voters will head to the polls to choose who they want to represent them next Thursday.

Pictured top: All Saints Church, Tooting, where the hustings was held on June 24 (picture: Google Street View)