OLIVER, the workhouse orphan who tremblingly asks for more gruel, symbolises the desperate straits of poverty the welfare state supposedly consigned to history in the middle of the last century.
So how can the number of people asking for food parcels from charities in Scotland have doubled in the past two years?
All the evidence points to a gaping hole in the social security safety net. The latest figures from Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) show the number of people without enough money to buy food is increasing relentlessly. The 2200 people it helped apply to charities for food or help with energy bills last year are the human reality behind statistics such as 800,000 families in Scotland now being in fuel poverty. Many now also face food poverty, as evidenced by the growing demand on the Trussell Trust. The Christian charity, which aims not only to feed the hungry but empower communities, reports a 100% increase in the last year in the number of people receiving an emergency pack of nutritionally-balanced foodstuffs from its network of foodbanks throughout the UK. These now include 10 in Scotland.
The choice between heating or eating faced by too many low-income households will have become more acute this winter as food prices soar due to drought in the US and poor harvests in many parts of the world. But changes to the benefits system, combined with stagnant wages, reduced hours and public sector job cuts, have already pushed many families into a desperate situation.
The evidence from Citizens Advice Scotland is that bureaucratic delay, new rules and wrong decisions on benefit claims are the most significant factors in leaving people without enough money to buy food. The system takes no account of the financial precariousness of people on low wages or dependent on benefits. Despite the Government's promise of making work pay, families earning £17,000 a year, for example, have lost £74 a week in working tax credit. Rising bills make it impossible to save, so a loss of benefit such as disability living allowance or a gap between losing a job and receiving jobseekers' allowance means instantly being on the breadline.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Welfare and Pensions Secretary, likes to cast himself as the William Beveridge of our age. He, too, wants to fight Beveridge's "giant evils", specifically, of course, idleness. But what of the others? What of want? There can be no doubt of the genuine need of people who have no alternative but to apply for food parcels via vetting bodies such as CAS and even Job Centres.
There is something undeniably rotten in a country where dustbins are full of wasted food and obesity is a major health problem yet tens of thousands of people are dependent on charities for tins of soup and teabags. The current cost-driven welfare reform will cost more than it saves unless it ends incompetence and ensures people have enough money to eat.
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