Are food banks a scandal? For this week’s Spectator, I visited the Salisbury food bank, set up in 2000, to find out what causes families to turn to these charities. I must admit that when I arrived at the headquarters of the Trussell Trust, which runs many of the food banks in this country, I was expecting to meet more angry people, spitting fire about the cruel government. Instead I interviewed Chris Mould, the Trust’s chief executive, who was so unremittingly positive about the work that food banks do that I ended up writing a rather different piece than the one I set out to do.
True, Mould was unimpressed with some of the government’s benefit cuts, which he worries will have unintended and costly consequences. But most of all, he was keen to impress upon me that food banks are not a scandal. In fact, the real scandal is that they haven’t existed for longer in this country.
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