One third of usage of food banks in 2014/15 in Scotland is from children

Additional figures show that food bank usage across Scotland is increasing at a very high rate and that around 30% of the people requesting a parcel are in fact children (or they are households with a child). This is a statistic that is leading to concern from many experts, including those at the Trussell Trust, such as Mr. Gurr, who participated in the collection of the data.

The usage is skyrocketing in all areas of Scotland. In South Lanarkshire, the number of clients has increased by over 50%, and about 1500 of the people seeking help were children. Or the people requesting support were parents with children living in the home. One foodbank, which was the Clyde, Avon and Nethan centre had about 45 per cent of it’s clients as young people!

All across Scotland the total usage has been skyrocketing. Glasgow has 18,000 people using a Trussell Trust location and Edinburgh had 14,000. Those cities are also much higher than previous years.

In total, Trussell Trust provided emergency boxes of food to over 117,000 people in fiscal year 2014/2015. There were over 36,000 children in these figures. These number also count families that asked for help more than one time, so the number of unique users would be less than the 117,000.

All of this assistance was provided last year from less than 50 centres as well. This means that on average each food bank provided parcels to over 3000 clients. Without the help of volunteers and donations from others in the Scottish community, they could never have kept up with the demand.

This is only statistics from the Trussell Trust though. There are many other independent food banks in Scotland as well. They do not have this same data on how may people were served, or if they were children or not. Also many Scottish families are too ashamed to even ask for help, and those people would also not be counted in these statistics. So the true number of households in food poverty would be much higher.

Trussell Trust will ask for a reason why a Scottish family is using a food bank. Based on feedback from the applicant, people are saying they are impacted by benefit sanctions. There are many instances in which payments are being stopped by the government, and this is preventing families from having money to buy the food they need.

The main reason that more families with children are turning to a food bank in Scotland is due to being on a low income. The number of people claiming challenge this has increased by about 80%. Even with the improving economy, this is still the biggest growth driver. For 2014/15 there were about one in five people stating their income did not allow them to feed their family as they need to.

Others in Scotland are using a food bank due to delays or changes to their benefits, and a big reason here is the roll out of the Universal Credit. While the process is taking time, there are still thousands of household being impacted. There are often delays in when they receive their first payment.