Food Bank Britain
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading More or Less from the BBC. This is the version first broadcast on Radio 4. Hello and welcome to More or Less. It's not the size of our data set that matters, it's what we do with it that counts. This week, a Brazilian mathematical superstar as famous as the country's legendary footballers. The death of the man that economist Milton Friedman called the greatest social scientist who's lived and worked in the last half century. And some very unusual sporting activity. Women did it, men did it, young men did it, old men did it, fat men did it. Sometimes for a wager, someone would do it and say, I can run two miles in X, Y, Z time while eating a chicken. We'll be finding out about how the tools of statistical analysis are unearthing the forgotten history of running and maybe, just maybe, overturning a famous record.
But first, a topic that keeps hitting the headlines. One million Brits now using food banks.
Numbers relying on food banks triple in a year.
And lots of you have been sending us emails about those headlines. I'd be interested to hear some statistics on food banks.
One side of the argument is that this shows increasing poverty levels in the country.
The other is that more food banks exist, more people know about them, so more people use them. What's the real story?
Increased use of food banks is often reported as an indicator of increased food poverty. But can food bank statistics tell us anything about food poverty?
So where do these numbers come from and what do they mean? Our reporter Laura Gray has been taking a look. Let's start, Laura, with the headline that we just heard. Nearly a million people are now going to food banks. Is that true?
The figure comes from the Trussell Trust. It's the largest food bank network in the UK and runs over 400 food banks. A few weeks ago, they released their annual report, which said that over 900,000 people received a package of three days emergency food from Trussell Trust food banks in 2013 to 2014.
So almost a million.
That's certainly what the Trussell Trust website suggests, but actually the statistic doesn't track repeat visits. Some people will have collected Trussell Trust food packages more than once, and they'll have been counted more than once too.
So if I was to go to my local food bank three times in the same year, I would be counted as three separate people, not one person?
Yes.
So this 900,000, is this 450,000 people going twice or was it 9,000 people going 100 times? I mean, you would actually need to go 100 times if you were trying to eat for an entire year on food bank food.
It's certainly not a few thousand people going back 100 times. The Trussell Trust has done a small survey and it reckons that about two thirds of food bank users only visited once over a six month period. Not many came back again and again and again. So we're talking about maybe 700 or 800,000 individuals or families being helped. We can't be more precise than that. And remember, there are plenty of food banks that aren't part of the Trussell Trust network.
Well, in that case, why are we looking at Trussell Trust numbers then?
Because they're all we have. 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, politicians certainly think the Trussell Trust numbers are useful for beating each other over the head. The coalition's been criticised for presiding over a boom in food banks, and here's David Cameron last year fighting back.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:57
2
How many people did the Trussell Trust report used food banks in 2013–14 and what does that number actually measure?
4:57–11:00
3
Can Trussell Trust parcel counts be interpreted as the number of unique food bank users?
11:00–17:28
4
Why are Trussell Trust figures the main national dataset on food banks despite limitations?
17:28–28:05