Like three of the Shaftesbury Partnership key people, two of the Challenge Network’s co-founders are McKinsey men. My head was now swimming with Tory party chums.
I took myself back to the simple announcement of job centre staff giving out food vouchers. I wrote to my MP, Brian Donohoe the next day, and asked him to write to the minister in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions to find out more about this voucher for food parcels pilot scheme.
In February the minister, Steve Webb, wrote back. “These vouchers were only intended for those refused crisis loans or waiting on a benefit payment to be made,” he said.
But “crisis loans”, I learned, are small interest-free loans made by the DWP from the social fund to people in financial crisis due to unforeseen circumstances such as deaths, flooding, a child in hospital. They’re used to buy food and/or credits for gas and electric pre-payment metres in winter when social security benefits are unlikely to cover the weekly winter pre-payments required.
While researching crisis loans I stumbled across a coalition
government consultation paper issued in February 2011 stating the government’s intention to abolish the social fund, and instead give the money, un-ring-fenced, to English Councils who could refer people to community schemes (citing the Trussell Trust Food Parcel Service) rather than giving people crisis loans.
I had come a full circle. Hadn’t the minister told me that only those refused crisis loans would be given vouchers for food parcels? And here was the government proposing to abolish the social fund. . .in which case wouldn’t everyone who currently qualifies for a crisis loan get just a voucher for a food parcel in future? How many people would this affect?
In March I wrote again asking my MP to ask Steve Webb how many crisis loans were given out in England in 2010/2011. The minister’s stated in reply, dated 26th of March, that “2,697,000” were given out. I was in absolute shock. The government was advising councils not to give crisis loans, as the DWP currently do, but instead to send perhaps 2.6 million families, each year, to their friends at the Trussell Trust with vouchers for a 3 day family food parcel containing no fresh meat, no fresh milk, no fresh bread or vegetables
And people with allergies etc. should probably just pull themselves together and deal with it, same as people on ESA etc. should just stop complaining and get a job.
