THE sobering effect of visiting a food and clothing bank operating from a damp basement on one of the city’s most deprived housing estates prompted the Archdeacon of Sheffield, the Ven. Malcolm Chamberlain, to raise the issue nationally.
He told the General Synod in July: “We can and we must do better as a nation. These church-run initiatives are indeed good news, but surely the very fact that they are needed is nothing short of a scandal. . . I am restless about the continuing need for [foodbanks]. We value them because we have people utterly dependent on them, but continuing dependence is not what we need to create” (Synod, 12 July 2024).
He was introducing what proved to be a vigorous debate on poverty: many of the contributors were practitioners running foodbanks or family-support or homelessness charities (News, 12 July 2024). It came in the context of stark figures from Trussell on the extent of foodbank use, and an expectation from the Children’s Society that five million children would living in poverty in the UK this winter.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report on poverty, published in the run-up to last year’s General Election, painted a bleak picture. “The deeper we look, the faster it is rising. People in poverty are moving further and further below the poverty line. Little wonder that the visceral signs of hardship are all around us. Foodbank use and the number of families living in temporary accommodation are at record highs. Extreme forms of hardship, like having to rely on charity to be able to eat or stay warm, have become shockingly commonplace. This is social failure at scale.”
The 2024 Client report from Christians Against Poverty (CAP) describes UK families and individuals as “buckling under the weight” of the reality of debt and poverty. “Across the UK, hundreds of local churches are going above and beyond to clear the wreckage of debt and poverty and remove the barriers that prevent people from thriving. I’ve had the privilege of visiting some of these brilliant churches. I’ve seen their amazing impact first hand, and their compassion and determination is extraordinary,” its chief executive, Stewart McCulloch, writes in the foreword.
The Synod debate resulted in an expanded motion on the ills of the current crisis: “two-thirds of those who use food banks have disabilities or long-term health conditions, who find it nearly impossible to navigate the benefit system and be supported adequately”. It applauded “the incredible ministry and example of these churches and others who tirelessly run food banks, whilst lamenting and acknowledging the incredible personal and financial cost to this, which is driving some organisations to breaking point”.
So, what part should the Church play? As councils struggle to afford other than mandatory services, the situation is predicted to worsen, with more acute needs presented during th winter, though the festive period was a time when “we always see the best of society,” a spokesman for Church Action on Poverty, which also manages the Local Pantry network of neighbourhood hubs, says.
“Community groups rally round to help people who have least, and, year-round, there are some brilliant projects and churches delivering vital ongoing support. But society can’t sustainably run on ad hoc charity. That’s why our Let’s End Poverty campaign has been imploring politicians to deliver the lasting change we need at national level, so that families are freed from the grip of poverty for the long term.”
THE Revd Jonathan Macy is a Team Vicar in the Thamesmead Team Ministry, in Southwark diocese. His experience highlights the changing shape of communities and the reduction of resources which have left many churches struggling to fill the gaps.
Before Covid, the church had worked with the local council to act as a hub hosting services ranging from mother-and-toddler groups and holiday clubs to domestic-violence support groups. The 18 to 20 hours a week of provision brought much-needed income for the church. It stopped when the council went broke. During the pandemic, faith groups were excluded from grant applications.
Mr Macy is a one-man band. The demographic in his church is a young one: one third are under 18, and, in his mid-fifties, he is often the oldest person in his church on Sundays. Most of those in work are on shifts and on the minimum wage, and he “can never forecast what they’ll be doing the following week”, he says. “If I had a youth worker, the things I could do. If I had some retired volunteers, the things I could do.”
One in ten children in the area has special educational needs: in one school, it is almost one in three. People with disabilities are over-concentrated in areas such as Thamesmead, Mr Macy suggests. They don’t generally have high-profile jobs, and are allocated the cheapest housing. “Churches with the lowest resources are working with the highest and most complex needs,” he says.
But there is resilience here. “One of the things about our church is that people are just thankful for what they have, as opposed to complaining about what they don’t have,” he says. “They are generous with the little they have. We have seen answered prayer. We have seen people encounter God and have their lives changed.”
THE needs of people struggling to cope can be multiplied in the winter months. The Trussell community of foodbanks, many of them in churches, distributed 3.1 million emergency food parcels between April 2023 and March 2024: the most in a single year. It expects this year to be equally challenging, as more people struggle to afford even the essentials. Their constant call is for urgent action on hunger. They state that they “look to the day when no one in the UK needs a foodbank to survive”.
Like Trussell, the Feeding Liverpool network — first established through Churches Together in the Merseyside Region — hopes to see the need eliminated. The city is trying to go beyond crisis provision to embrace not just food insecurity, but the access to and take-up of healthy and nutritious food.
Sharing that ambition is Micah Liverpool, a social-justice charity formed by a partnership of the Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedral’s and St Bride’s, Liverpool. It has been working in the field for 14 years, and is noticing a steep rise in the number of people needing its emergency food-crisis provision.
Those struggling for food can receive a bag of groceries once a week to see them through three or four days — something they can repeat for four visits. It used to be eight visits, but that has proved unsustainable, the operations manager, Catherine Kearney, explained. The numbers of local people, asylum-seekers, and refugees seeking help have all increased.
“People are just generally struggling,” she says. “The cost of living hasn’t helped — there’s the price of food itself, but also energy bills, the numbers in temporary accommodation, other factors like people seeking asylum not being allowed to work. It makes life very precarious.
“Homelessness has increased in the city, too. There are many charities doing the same thing as us, or similar. We’re all struggling to make the amount of food or money we get in stretch, so that we can help meet the need.”
Micah is funded by what she describes as “a lot of generous, very faithful donors, either individuals or people from local churches. This year, we’ve had a grant from one of the universities in Liverpool, which is really helpful. We do get some trust and grant funding, and we’ve benefited from the Government’s Household Support fund. But it’s all getting more complex.
“As organisations, we don’t want to be competing against one another. We want to play to each other’s strengths, but that’s quite difficult when you’re trying to navigate funding pots or particular initiatives to support particular groups.”
The weekly food distribution operates from both St Bride’s, the biggest pantry, supporting up to 280 people a week, and the RC St Vincent de Paul. Micah has also set up two community food markets: one in St Dunstan’s, and the other in the adult-learning centre in Granby, Liverpool’s most deprived ward.
Here, only 26 per cent of residents work full-time. The markets, which operate on a pantry model, were set up to help people who could possibly pay a very small amount of money each week. For a payment of £2, they get some choice in the food that they receive: “There’s more dignity in that, rather than being handed a white carrier bag with food you haven’t actually chosen,” Ms Kearney suggests. “And we’re trying to offer more wraparound support, because food is part of the issue, but not the full story.”
While Micah is not a social-action group, there is the issue of treating people fairly, she says, according to the text that gives the organisation its name: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
It has linked up with the city council to “supply something that’s missing in the community” — not just the offer of tea and coffee, but a clothes rail and secondhand suitcases, and access for community-market members to services at the learning centre, which include health screening, mental-health support, and English and maths classes. The foodbanks are offering tea and toast in the winter, and cake in the summer. Micah also has a programme to help people into work, both paid and voluntary.
CHURCHES and charities working with homeless people are reporting a steep rise in the numbers of rough-sleepers. Recent data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government shows that the number of households facing homelessness in England between 2023 and 24 exceeded 320,000 — the highest on record. It represents an eight-per-cent rise on the previous year.
The housing charity Shelter estimated the number of homeless people in the city of Nottingham on 30 June last year as 1997, an increase of 24 per cent in one year. Here, the ending of a private tenancy continues to be one of the leading causes of homelessness, including households that were served a Section 21 “No fault eviction”. The street-outreach team from the Framework Housing Association found 49 people sleeping rough in Nottinghamshire on one night last month: an increase of 188 per cent on the previous year.
The local charity Emmanuel House, founded in 1976 by Fr Roger Killeen, opened its emergency winter shelter in mid-October, a provision that will run through to April and will cost £135,000. It is the only free emergency accommodation project in the city, accommodates 30, and offers much more than simply a bed for the night. Guests are provided with breakfast and evening meals, are assigned a case worker, and have access to all the morning drop-in services, including mental-health teams.
When more beds are needed under the Government’s severe-weather emergency protocol (SWEP) — a locally agreed procedure that comes into play when temperatures are forecast to be below 0° for three nights in a row — they generally manage it using churches, says its chief executive, Denis Tully, a General Synod member. His home church, St John’s, Carrington, is one such provider.
Emmanuel House provides “all the things you didn’t think about this morning, like whether you have clean clothes, whether you’ll have something to eat today”, he tells children in school assemblies. What drives him is “the belief that the good that gets done through the charity has a ripple effect beyond what we can immediately see. And that’s where the faith aspect comes in.”
CITY LIFE CHURCH, in Southampton, led by Paul Woodman, with Dan Pooley, is instrumental in managing a network of churches and charities engaged in community support across the city. In 2018, Mr Woodman — an Honorary Fellow of Solent University — offered his business administration expertise when the council, charities, and churches were seeking to address rising homelessness. He mounted a day conference to bring all the different groups together to explore ways to alleviate it.
Many good outcomes came from it, notably the winter beds scheme operated by several teams of volunteers who cover the 12-hour night shifts, many of them from City Life and other churches. “It’s only possible with volunteers. Some people have joined the church because they know we’re active in this area. People just want to put their faith into action, don’t they?” he suggests.
Longer-term solutions have emerged, over the six years since then, to move people out of homelessness: a social-investment scheme to enable the purchase of houses for rent and the provision of wraparound support; Street Pastors, a community-action support group; a Big Difference food-distribution scheme; and provision of clean clothes and toiletries packs, an initiative with which many schools engage.
City Life held a commemoration service in November to remember those homeless people who had died, and to bring together their relatives and the emergency and hospital workers who had attended them. “The whole sector came together to remember. It was very moving,” Mr Woodman says.
The work is supported by the Society of St James, based in Portsmouth, which tackles the many aspects of homelessness. It owns and manages a range of accommodation, including hostels, shared houses, and independent flats for homeless people, with more than 300 bed spaces in Southampton and other parts of Hampshire.
It ran a Christmas campaign — delivered by a daily Advent calendar — that seeks to raise £50,000 by suggested festive means, urging donors: “Help us to challenge the stereotypes and prejudices that surround homelessness, and create a more inclusive and compassionate society.”
St Denys’s is one of the churches closely involved in the community work. Every week, it offers a free sit-down Sunday lunch to anyone in need in the community. Everyone is welcome, no questions asked. The Southampton Sunday Lunch received the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, much to the delight of all those who work on it. The church also runs the Community Food project every Friday morning, for between 39 and 50 households to choose food and enjoy a welcoming social space.
CORNWALL can testify to the fact that poverty is not limited to city life. Seventeen of its council wards are among the 20 per cent most deprived in the country. The Bishop of St Germans, the Rt Revd Hugh Nelson, chairs the faith communities’ capacity-building organisation Transformation Cornwall, which has its roots in the Church Urban Fund.
When energy costs soared in the winter of 2002, it joined with the diocese of Truro and the Cornwall Faith Forum to support the Poverty Hurts cost-of-living campaign, by encouraging households not in need of the universally applied £400 energy rebate to “donate the rebate” (News 21 October 2022).
“Cornwall is perceived as being — and is — a place of beauty, happiness, and leisure, when people go on holiday; but you can’t eat the view,” the Bishop says. “The cost of living here is relatively high, because it’s a holiday destination, and wages are low for the same reason. Work is part time, seasonal, very often piecework. Transport links aren’t great. The picture people see of the view is true, but it’s not the whole picture.”
The diocese is now funding research carried out by Plymouth Marjon University on deprivation in rural Cornwall: something that is widely felt in Cornwall to be little understood by policymakers. “It will help us to hear from those who experience life on a low income in Cornwall. It will help us to understand how that affects life chances and opportunity, and will help us to be faithful to the gospel call to serve those in need,” the Diocesan Secretary, Simon Cade, says.
The University of Coventry’s 2023 report Hidden Hardship highlighted elements of rural hardship with which the Area Dean for North Cotswolds, Canon Katrina Scott, could fully identify. “There are real extremes of wealth and poverty here,” she says.
“Yes, you’ll see expensive houses. But there are pockets of poverty, and the sorts of things that are around the corner if you’re in a city and struggling with poverty are even harder to access here. Somebody who’s struggling can’t get to a Jobcentre without getting a bus or travelling in a car.
“It’s difficult for that voice to be heard in our local communities, because it may be just a handful of properties in some villages rather than the majority. And we find, in all areas with issues of poverty, that sometimes people don’t want to talk about the issues they’re having, and are trying to hide some of it from neighbours and friends.”
The local foodbank is seeing the most need in its history. “This is the worst it’s ever been,” she confirms. “The need doubled between 2022 and 2023, and it has increased this year by another 11 per cent.” Churches have several ways of supporting the communities: “warm spaces” in four of the seven villages now run all year round, providing warmth, companionship, and food and drink, and not necessitating any travel.
“But there’s the bigger stage as well, which is about saying that we need to be sometimes challenging the need for all this,” Canon Scott reflects. “Our churches are talking about adopting the Anti-Poverty Charter at the moment, and reflecting on how we can live out some of the principles of that within our own life together.
“It’s about how we live as community, and not just what we do for others. There’s a real sense of the church being present as part of the community set-up. People are very open to the church having a voice and having a part to play.”