Laura Gray
speaker
148 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2012
last heard Jul 2014
Laura Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We have no idea how many food banks there are, and even the definition of food bank is still up for grabs.
Here's Hannah Lambie-Mumford from Sheffield University, who's researched food banks.
Trussell Trust data is the only data that's systematically collected on a national scale that tells us anything about food bank use in the UK.
There's no other set of data like it.
We can't capture data from independent projects on a national scale or any other kind of food aid initiatives either, given the nature of these projects which are independent, community-based and working in a variety of ways.
So this data set is actually incredibly valuable to us in terms of telling us about patterns in food bank use.
It's all we've got to go on.
Well, what the Prime Minister said would have been true if he'd been explicit that he was only referring to Trussell Trust food banks.
The trust was tiny nine years ago.
It did indeed give out more than ten times as many parcels by the end of Labour's term in office as it did in 2005-2006.
But then it's continued to grow, a further 22-fold increase under the coalition.
So the Prime Minister might want to be careful about where he points this particular statistic.
The Trussell Trust press releases certainly invite you to reach the conclusion that the more food parcels they get out the door, the worse food poverty must be.
For instance, they nearly tripled their output last year and described that as shocking.
But maybe the demand was there all along.
We don't know.
Well, no, they don't.
The House of Commons Library published a report on food banks and food security a few weeks ago, but it concluded that there is no effective monitoring of household food security in the UK.
At the same time, food prices have risen by almost 20% more than prices as a whole since 2005.
There are other surveys that suggest that food insecurity is an increasing problem.
Showing 101–120 of 148 · page 6 of 8
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