Food banks: hard to say whether rising use reflects rising demand

“This week, Mr Speaker, Oxford University studies found that there’s a direct link between rising levels of benefit sanctions and rising demand for food banks. A million people accessed a food bank last year and received a food parcel, only 40,000 did so in 2010”.

Jeremy Corbyn, 2 November 2016

We looked at the Oxford study last week. Mr Corbyn gives a fair account of its findings.

There’s no single estimate of all people using food banks in the UK. Labour told us that Mr Corbyn’s figures come from the Trussell Trust, a charity which gave out 1.1 million food packs last year. It was 40,000 in 2009/10.

The Trust’s figures count the number of emergency food packs, not the number of people. It says that on average people need two packs per year, so the number of individual people using its services is likely around 550,000.

It’s difficult to compare these numbers over time because the number of food banks has also increased. More people have access to a food bank now than in 2010, so these figures alone can’t tell us about demand.

The Trust says that the number of people they helped last year grew faster than the number of new food banks.

Trussell Trust food banks account for around half of all food banks in the UK, according to a 2014 estimate. So their figures can’t tell us how many people are receiving emergency food in total, but a million individuals is plausible if half of food banks served half a million people.