Opinion

Keir Starmer promised to end food bank Britain. Now it feels nothing more than a pipe dream

Food bank volunteers are having to face facts, writes Sabine Goodwin, director of the Independent Food Aid Network

by: Sabine Goodwin

16 May 2025

Volunteers at a food bank. Credig: IFAN

Labour’s election manifesto committed to ending mass reliance on emergency food parcels. Ten months since Sir Keir Starmer’s party came to power, food bank volunteers are having to face facts.

Latest Independent Food Aid Network data demonstrating increased demand shows just how desperate the situation remains. Ending the need for food banks looks more like a pipe dream than any kind of realistic goal.

Disability benefit cuts threaten to further impoverish hundreds of thousands of people and add yet more pressure to overstretched services. Funding is harder than ever to come by and donations have dwindled. Meanwhile, long-exposed policies driving hunger remain steadfastly in place as increasing numbers of people seek long-term support and report extreme hardship.

The reality checks don’t stop there. There’s much more beneath the surface of the generosity of a legion of food aid volunteers working within a labyrinth of community food organisations. Just as relentless demand on food banks pushes some to the point of closure, burnt-out volunteers are considering the impact of being ‘exploited’ by a succession of governments refusing to take responsibility for its citizens basic needs. Volunteers’ Herculean efforts may demonstrate plentiful solidarity, community spirit and neighbourliness, but a moral line has been crossed.

Twenty years ago, volunteering in a local community looked very different. People spent their valuable spare time helping their neighbours, but, with barely a food bank in sight, they weren’t having to provide sustenance to keep people alive. Nor were volunteers trying to give emotional and practical support to prevent people from being pushed over the edge by poverty. Community volunteering within the UK’s chaotic charitable food aid sector is nothing short of running a fourth emergency service.

What’s more, food bank teams are also all too often taking on the discarding of food waste amongst their endless lists of tasks. As Feedback UK’s recent report – Used By: How businesses dump their food waste on charities – makes clear, supermarkets and other businesses are channelling food surplus in the direction of food banks while transferring responsibility for its disposal to ‘frustrated and angry’ volunteers.

The darker side of food bank volunteerism has also been highlighted in a recent report on managing hunger trauma. The ‘systemic betrayal, moral injury, and distress’ experienced by food aid staff and volunteers has been laid bare. Volunteers are being asked to make impossible decisions as to who and how to support desperate people all too often putting their own wellbeing at risk. As the report’s authors put it: ‘Many people feel trapped by the responsibility, knowing the consequences for those in need, were they to absolve themselves of this responsibility.’

As we near the start of Labour’s second year in power, an unexpected question is being asked about what food bank volunteers might do if emergency food parcels were no longer needed. The answer, of course, is simple. First and foremost, the exploitation of their good will would come to an end.

Food banks might be transformed into community hubs. Volunteers could provide the ‘cup of tea’ and companionship that so often accompanies a food parcel withoutbeing overburdened by responsibility. Perhaps they might train as advice workers (advice is key in a society without the need for charitable food aid). Ultimately, liberated food bank volunteers could do a million things in their communities and might not wish to volunteer at all.

But their precious time and efforts wouldn’t be spent filling the gaps left by the state because our broken social security system lets whole swathes of the population through its giant cracks. Volunteers cannot be responsible for the inadequacy of social security payments and wages nor the impacts of waiting five weeks for universal credit, the two-child limit, the benefit cap, ‘no recourse to public funds’ status, and sanctions.

It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that people are guaranteed the essentials and can ultimately access a Living Income through a fit-for-purpose social security system alongside fair wages. It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that, beyond March 2026, there is permanent crisis support that’s adequate, well-promoted and easy to access alongside critical advice to maximise income.

And if the moral arguments are not enough, Trussell has recently laid out indisputable economic arguments for the policy changes needed to address food insecurity in The Cost of Hunger and Hardship. They found that ‘the overall cost of hunger and hardship to the economy, the public purse, and public services in the UK was at least £75.6 billion in 2022/23’.

Food bank volunteers might not be able to go on strike, but they can imagine a better future. They can call out the injustices that the people they support are facing and they can facilitate their voices being heard. They can highlight the ‘moral injuries’ that they themselves are suffering. They can continue to lay out the steps that the government must take to ensure everyone in our society can access enough money to buy food and other essentials. And they can continue to urge the government to stick to its manifesto promise to end the ‘moral scar on our society’ that has swept them up in its wake.

Sabine Goodwin is director of the Independent Food Aid Network.

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