‘You’re Seeing People Who Wouldn’t have been Struggling Before Who Now Need Help’

Sian Norris returns to the town where her family once lived to learn how the cost of living crisis is impacting the lives of ordinary people and their communities in north Wales

It’s nearing the end of Shotton food bank’s opening hours when Ceri (not her real name) arrives. A young mum and cat-owner, dressed in trendy black jeans and a black top, she seems nervous. “I’ve never done this before,” she explains, scrolling through the emails on her phone to find her voucher. She’s smiling, but you can tell that beneath the smile are tears which, every now and again, swell in her eyes. 

Steve, who has been volunteering at the local network of food banks for 10 years now, instantly puts her at ease. I ask her about her cat, who was recently ill, and we chat as Steve loads up her bags of basic food staples, along with a bag of cat food. She also gets a free SIM card. By the time she leaves, her smile is real, the tears are gone. 

“We want to send people away with a smile,” Steve says. “So they leave feeling more confident than when they came in. We want them to feel they have been to a nice place”.

It’s a busy day at the food bank but not, Steve tells me, as busy as last week – “11 people in the first half-hour,” he says. The school holidays were quieter, explains Sandra, who runs the centre.

Not because people aren’t in need. But because they don’t want the children to know. 

It’s the first time I’ve been to Shotton, a small town in Flintshire, North Wales, for a year. Last time I was here was for my nana’s funeral – she had lived here since she moved as a child from South Wales, getting married, raising a family, and then her and granddad spending almost half their lives on the old people’s estate where she worked as a warden, before they retired and became residents themselves. My granddad worked at the iconic steelworks until the redundancies during the Thatcher era, becoming a delivery driver after that. 

Every summer for about 10 years, until I was a teenager, we would come up to Shotton to visit for a week, before heading to the North West of England to see my paternal grandparents for a second week, and then to my dad’s sister in the North East for a third week. That is how I remember my childhood summer holidays: my brother and I as two little parcels, delivered to relatives waiting at service stations. 

What I remember of Shotton is playing bingo in the old people’s centre; my granddad singing on the piano in the centre; watching Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds on VHS; visiting my nana’s sister and her husband who kept racing pigeons; going to the woods where granddad would tell us stories about goblins. 

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Before arriving at the food bank, I take a walk around Shotton, up towards the estate where nana and granddad lived. The high street is buzzing, and I’m struck by a memory of going to a shop as a child full of odds and ends, and buying some cheap porcelain opera masks decorated with glitter and feathers.

The shop is still there, as are various cafes and pubs where people are stopping for lunch, chatting about the breaking news of the day: the Queen is under medical supervision, by the time I arrive at a friend’s that evening, she will have died. 

Semi-detached houses with nicely-kept driveways spread out of the centre, as I follow a wooded path towards Higher Shotton. Is this where we used to come, I wonder, on walks with granddad? Higher Shotton has the largest council estate in the county: when I was a kid, driving into the town, there was an abandoned council estate that had been compulsory purchased to allow for a road to be built, but the road didn’t get built, at least not back then, so there were just these ghost houses. 

Back at the food bank, and Kath has popped round to get her bags and for a chat. Steve and Sandra know her well, and the conversation covers everything from her health (not good) to her grandchildren (gifted colouring crayons from the food bank) and her best friend. I ask about her concerns about the winter, and the energy crisis. The anxiety she feels is written on her face. 

“It’s not just the gas and electric, it’s the price of food, everything is going up,” she says. “It’s getting to the stage where I don’t put the gas on, I put an extra cardigan on if I get cold at night”.

Kath has a heart condition and arthritis, she needs to keep warm or the pain in her joints flares up. “I am dreading the winter,” she admits. 

“We are thinking about how we can provide warm spaces,” says Andy Leake, a church minister and chair of trustees across the nine food banks across Flintshire. The banks are affiliated to the Trussell Trust. “Especially for lonely and isolated people, and elderly people who watch every penny and don’t want to turn the heating up. How can we be a place where people might not come for food, but can come for a natter and a cup of tea to warm up”. 

“This is not a particularly deprived area, there are pockets of deprivation but we have done well to keep our industrial base and to maintain good manufacturing jobs,” Sean Bibby, the local councillor for Shotton West, tells me. He was walking past the food bank and Steve stopped him for a chat, introducing us. “But what we are seeing in the last few months are people we would not be expecting to be in difficulty suddenly finding themselves in a lot of difficulty. We’ve had a lot of people who have been really struggling and that number is increasing every day”. 

Bibby’s assessment is borne out by the statistics: in Flintshire, 21.2% of children are living in low-income households, up from 15.8% the previous year. That’s a devastating increase, and it’s one being experienced by mums like Ceri. 

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The food bank itself is based in an old bingo hall that is in the process of being converted into a church. It’s in the hall itself where I sit down with Andy Leake. The space is extraordinary, painted in vibrant pinks and purples, a stage at the front and a disused bar in the corner. It feels like an old vaudeville music hall, all faded glamour. 

“We thought if we fed 1,000 people in the first year, we’d be doing something,” Andy says. “We ended up feeding two and a half thousand people”. 

The numbers are going up month by month. Andy hands me a piece of paper on which he has jotted down the figures for how often the food bank is being used by people in Shotton. Between 1 April 2021 and 8 September 2021, they were supporting 103 adults and 76 children, or 179 people in total. In the same period this year, the number had increased four-fold, to 484 low-income househo