Poverty-stricken families join a lengthening queue for food handouts

Charities and voluntary groups are sounding alarm bells at the number of people going hungry as benefits fall and prices rise Stuck around the walls of the church hall at St Paul’s in the heart of Leicester is a series of green laminated signs. There’s one for the Centre Project and another for The Bridge. There’s the Welcome Project, the Leicester Aids Support Service, the St Paul’s over-60s group and more besides. Stacked up tidily in front of each one, awaiting collection, is food. Lots of it. Boxes of fresh vegetables sit alongside bags of freshly baked bread; jars of seafood pasta sauce, still under plastic wrap, are tucked in alongside sacks of rice. Each one of these heaps, obtained by the Leicester branch of the food waste charity FareShare, is a marker for chronic hunger; a profound hunger that, as the economic forecasts worsen and the Conservative party meets in Manchester this weekend to argue over what can be done about it, is only deepening. “There’s a big increase in demand,” says John Russell of the Centre Project, a drop-in project in the heart of Leicester supporting people in need. “We used to feed 30 or 40 people a week. Now it’s 70 or 80.” Housing provision and benefit rules have changed, he says, and that’s creating need. Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. “People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren’t coping.” Yvonne Welford, who runs the over-60s group for St Paul’s, is seeing the same picture. “There’s been a major increase in demand, especially in the last six months, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse.” Poverty has al ways been a fact of life, even in good times. But FareShare is now seeing a serious growth in the number of people without the resources to feed themselves properly that is, experts say, without precedent in modern Britain. All of the organisations in Leicester that are supplied by FareShare describe themselves as being dependent on the charity, which obtains food from manufacturers and supermarkets that might otherwise end up rotting in landfill sites, and supplies it to groups helping those in need. Founded in 2004, the charity works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services. John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: “It’s a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we’re distributing has risen from 41

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