When did food banks start in the UK?

[Snog]

I don't remember food banks being a thing whilst I was young.
Are they a fairly recent phenomena?

I find it so shameful that we need food banks when we supposedly are one of the richest countries of the world 😞

This is the first year my dc's school have given a note to all parents telling them that the school can give out food bank vouchers and where the food banks are and how to access them in the holidays. The school has got more middle class if anything (about 2/3 FSM five years ago, 50% now).

There used to be a hardship fund if your benefits hadn't come through or your cooker died, and sanctions used to be very rare, whereas now I know half a dozen people who have been sanctioned despite being a nice middle-class educated type with most of my friends being educated and generally working (90% of housing benefit claimants are in work, I think?) . Huge cultural change in 20 years.

lemonsandlimes. I didn't say that he MADE the speech last week,I merely said that I'd heard it last week. And yes,I'm always happy to bash the Tories.

I remember collection boxes at the supermarkets in the 1980s during the miners' strikes, but that was specifically for them and their families.

In the 80's we had a Christmas hamper from the SVP (catholic charity) and my school collected things for the hampers during advent. My mum was raising us alone after my dad died. I didn't want the others to know as being poor was a stigma. When DS1 was small I got a food parcel from social services. Someone (I suspect my university tutor who found out what a mess my life with my now ex was) reported me and they did a welfare check, decided DS was safe but we needed food. They topped up the gas and electric meters too. That would have been 1999. Thank goodness I'm no longer in that situation.

My dad was a miner and we received food parcels during the 1984-5 strike. A lot of it was donated by German miner's welfare organisations and there was also butter and canned meat from European 'mountains'.

I volunteer for trussle and it's 3 times per crisis that they can be used although we would never leave anyone with no food.
As well as getting food some of the people benefit from the contact with other people. We have clients who sit with us for the entire time we are open just for the company.

They've been around for quite a while. My father sperm donor used to drag us to one run by nuns on the weekend he had us. Frequently. He had cash to feed us but the horses were more important than feeding his kids.

We also used to get a food parcel at Christmas.

We have clients who sit with us for the entire time we are open just for the company.

Could you do that if you didn’t need food?

Is there something like a “company bank”.

Asking for a friend (just kidding, don’t have any friends).

Never heard of them until David CAmeron came in

I can recall SW’s that I worked with 22 years ago referring hungry children and their parents to a LA centre that would give them Marks and spencer sandwiches etc. It was stock that had that days sell by date. Heard it stopped after a while due to fears that someone would get food poisoning and sue the council

I was the accountant for a charity who set up a local one back in 2003. Back then, though, there was no publicity about it - also very little signage on their premises - just a small plaque beside the door. Now it's all over local social media and has a bright illuminated sign above the "shop" window.

This doesnt quite answer your question but it gives an indication of how foodbank use has grown.

Source here;

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/24/food-bank-use-trussell-trust-universal-credit-figures

We didn’t have them up north in the 80s. We were literally starving, my mother was so thin because she only ate my leftovers. We had coal fires too, so it was freezing in winter if you couldn’t afford coal and there was no help available. My mum used to clean for the neighbour who bought us one bag of coal per week in return, otherwise we’d have frozen to death.

You could call early soup kitchens and the like, food banks.

But lets face it. The Tory cuts (2010) have meant that people, including the most vulnerable and children rely on Charity, for food.

So if it wasn't for Charities working in the UK, we'd have children suffering from not only homeless but malnutrition as well.

Yet we all accept this.

We have a rise in deaths in healthy young people, because of underfunding. A rise in the infant mortality and Mother death rate. As well as diseases related to poverty, some of which has led to death, in children/babies.

It would be kinder to open the workhouses. The mental torture of being poor, disabled is inhumane in a developed Country.

I think they started in their current form post-war, certainly no later than 1970s. (Giving alms or food to the poor has been going on for centuries, whether individually or by a group usually parish-based - the history of support from the church is way longer than that if support from the state, and is continuing as youncan easily see if you look at the affiliations and locations of food banks today)

Even in the Blair years when we were all deluded about public spending and everything being fine and dandy, the need was there and they never went away.

We do talk about them considerably more when it fits the tropes