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There is a minimum of 3,000 food banks operating across Britain and Northern Ireland, a patchwork comprising tens of thousands of volunteers and millions of users – and it only represents a fraction of the food insecurity it seeks to ease.
The Trussell Trust’s end of year statistics, combined with the latest data from the Independent Food Aid Network, go some way to show the scale of food bank usage. Between them, the two networks account for a large part of the food bank landscape, though by no means all of it.
The decentralised, often volunteer-led, nature of food banks, soup kitchens, and other food aid supports means that demonstrating the extent of dependence is near impossible, but the collated data available still paints a damning picture of our welfare state.
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There are more Trussell Trust and IFAN food banks in the UK than hospitals, 1,200, and Jobcentre Plus locations, 630, combined.
The Trussell Trust alone distributed 3.1 million food parcels between April 2023 and March 2024 – a 94% increase during the past five years.
Demand has increased from 1,354,682 food parcels between 2017-2018 to 2,578,010 in 2020-2021, and 2,997,589 in 2022-2023.
It should be noted that IFAN represents hundreds of independent food banks but there are hundreds more which operate alone or within local networks. Some of IFAN’s members are social supermarkets, food pantries, or community kitchens.
The situation is not sustainable at all and has been proving itself to be unsustainable for a good couple of years now
IFAN director Sabine Goodwin
Sabine Goodwin, IFAN director, told Byline Times that it is “so important for the incoming government to take on the enormity of the crisis”.
She said that the Trussell Trust and IFAN statistics, taken at face value, are likely to under-sell the true scale of the situation.
“It’s vital to get a bird’s eye view and see that food bank numbers represent a wider problem of food insecurity, because that’s what people are struggling with,” she said. “Trussell Trust food parcel data represents the tip of the tip of the iceberg.”
Although there are local authorities with particularly high rates, the breadth of demand is perhaps best captured by the fact that the highest 10 are spread across seven regions.
Given that most insecure people don’t use food banks – only 14% of very low food security households report using a food bank in the last 30 days – this vast system reflects just a fraction of the hardship it is trying to alleviate.
There are now 7.2 million people living in food insecure households. A record 2.1 million state school students are eligible for free school meals, while another 800,000 are living in poverty but don’t qualify.
Food inflation in Britain is at its highest level in 45 years, while the number of single-parent households in severe food insecurity has doubled since the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of the support provided by Trussell Trust food banks in the previous year was for families with children.
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Tens of thousands of volunteers continue to make this work possible, with the Trussell Trust alone recording 36,000 in