"State must back food banks", says Archbishop of Canterbury

Archbishop called for £150m state-backed system to combat hunger in UK

A new row over food banks erupted last night after a report backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury called for a £150 million state-backed system to combat hunger in Britain.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby appeared to be on course for a clash with David Cameron after calling on the Prime Minister to reverse his decision not to take European funds to boost UK food banks.

Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, Archbishop Welby makes a powerful call for more help to prevent families going hungry. The Archbishop is to launch a Parliamentary report in Westminster tomorrow, and calls on the Government to take ‘quick action’ to implement its recommendations in full.

Separately, this newspaper has obtained details of the report’s radical proposals, which call for:

• A new publicly funded body, Feeding Britain, involving eight Cabinet Ministers, to work towards a ‘hunger free Britain’.
  
• Bigger food banks, called Food Banks Plus, to distribute more free food and advise people how to claim benefits and make ends meet.
  
• A rise in the minimum wage and the provision free school meals during school holidays for children from poor families.
  
• New measures to make it harder to strip people of benefits for breaking welfare rules – including soccer style ‘yellow cards’ instead of instant bans.
  
• Action to make supermarkets give more food to the poor.

The report by the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in Britain comes amid an intense debate over welfare and poverty.

Experts claimed that Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement last week would mean massive cuts in welfare in the coming years.

Praising food bank volunteers who have rescued the poor from hunger, the Welby-backed report says they have achieved the ‘equivalent to a social Dunkirk.’

Notably, it adds: ‘This extraordinary achievement has been done without the assistance of central government. If the Prime Minister wants to meet his Big Society it is here.’

The report calls for the establishment of a new network, Feeding Britain, made up of food banks, charities, the food industry, and, crucially, eight Government departments.

Such a move would mark a significant extension of the Welfare State, by giving the Government a key role in overseeing the distribution of free food.

In this day and age there ought be no need for food-banks in the UK. Politicians of all colours have demonised the weak and the sick in our society, often in collusion with the media. It is time it was stopped; anyone can fall on hard times.

And whilst the Archbishop is making the right noises, the church (one of the richest bodies in the UK) could be doing a whole lot more itself.

I'm cynical enough to believe there will always be some need for food banks since no welfare system is ever perfect and there will always be cracks through which people fall.

The sudden rise in Britain though is as much caused of the abandonment of so-called "crisis loans" by the DWP as the increase in "sanctions" on unemployed claimants.

Crisis loans themselves replaced one-off "hardship payments" which existed successfully for several decades before the Thatcher era.