Food bank director warns of rising need

The director of a foodbank charity has called for more to be done about the growing need for its services.

Corrine Boden, the director of services for Stoke-on-Trent Foodbank, said in the 12 years since she started working for the charity, need for services that tackle food poverty had only grown.

"If you look at the landscape it's really changed, it used to be a lot of families, now there is a lot of single people too," she said.

She said she had also noticed a shift to people in work like "nurses and business people" needing to use the foodbank.

The charity has just reopened its services in Meir, putting them up to 16 sites across the city by adding Broadway Methodist church to the roster.

The service, which is now run in conjunction with the Trussell Trust, used to be ran just by the church and closed in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.

The reopened food bank means that people who use it will not have to travel as far, whereas before they had to go either to Longton or Weston Coyney.

When asked about why the service had reopened, Ms Boden pointed out that people who needed to use a foodbank might not have the money to travel long distances, meaning services needed to be easily accessible.

She said the situation in the city was getting worse, adding: "66% of people who came to a food bank in the last six months have been in in-work poverty."

The reasons for people needing to use the food bank were also changing, she said, the charity keeps track of why people are coming to the service and "the biggest were debt and health".