The crisis support system is broken. Only a radical reform will make it again fit for purpose for families facing emergencies they cannot handle on their own.
For what do you do when redundancy hits, or cancer is diagnosed, or there’s a death in the family? How do you cope with the extra expenses that fall on family budgets when, already
on low wages or low benefits, you can barely cover your everyday living expenses and make ends meet?
Every family finds itself with additional burdens at some point in their life cycle because of unexpected events – from sudden illness or disability or changes at work affecting family fortunes. But our country is doing far too little to help people cope. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, almost four million citizens, one million of them children, are destitute or near destitute, either going without shelter, meals or the funds to keep themselves clean or adequately clothed.
Fourteen years of Conservative austerity did not only cut benefits for those in and out of work but also destroyed the crisis support system, not least with the abolition of the Social Fund, which had helped families facing unexpected emergencies. Crisis support was transferred from the government to charities, the social safety net unceremoniously removed from the social security system and left to food banks. While the Household Support Fund was later introduced, it is administered not by the Department for Work and Pensions but by local authorities, and its £1bn-a-year budget has to cover everything from food, heating and rent to the purchase of essential goods from washing machines to cookers for the 14 million people officially in poverty, offering on average £1.50 a week – hardly enough to pay for a loaf of bread, far less household necessities.
Just think of a mother, suddenly fleeing domestic violence with her children, having not just to find accommodation but also to replace the household furnishings, everything from toiletries to beds, that she has had to leave behind.
Charities like The Felix Project and FareShare, which provide surplus food to community pantries and food banks, have increasingly been relied upon as the “fourth emergency service”, but the breakdown of the crisis support system is one of the reasons food bank numbers have dramatically risen from just 35 in 2010 to 2,600 now. When squeezed between rising demand from a growing population of those in acute need and the rising cost of food, they cannot do all they want to do. Of the organisations supported by the Felix Project, 84 per cent have reported facing financial instability in the last year, with 9 out of 10 seeing increased demand from their communities.
Other sources of help – including council tax support, energy subsidies and discretionary housing payments – are available to struggling families, but each of these schemes operates in isolation, with large disparities in availability around the country. Many families are not even aware of the existence of such schemes.
One indicator of the broken crisis support system is the number of children forced into care not because of domestic violence or poor parenting but simply because of the poverty experienced by their families. A few months ago, I visited Wigan’s much-praised The Brick homeless charity to open its new crisis support service. At the end of the afternoon, a father walked in with his 16-year-old son to say he could no longer afford to keep him – and immediately walked out and away, leaving his teenager in a flood of tears. For a few pounds a week supplementing the father’s wages, that child could have remained at home, but the cost of his son in care could have been as much as £200,000 a year. And as Ashley John-Baptiste recounts in his own moving experience of being in care – in the issue of the New Statesman that accompanies this edition of Spotlight – the high costs of induced admissions to residential care show how counterproductive it is to kill off our national crisis support system.
I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in Wigan and in five other regions of the country in a project that complements food banks. Multibanks are clothing banks, hygiene banks, furnishings banks, bedding banks and baby banks rolled into one, there to meet the holistic needs of families and provide more than a safety net for those in poverty – rather a springboard out of poverty. What’s more, some Multibanks are not just tackling poverty but tackling waste, because the main source of supplies are surplus goods, from microwaves to trainers, from sheets and towels to shampoo that companies no longer need and which would otherwise be incinerated or sent to landfill. So Multibanks can make the connections between the companies that have goods people need and the charities that know the people who need them. And the expansion of Multibanks to all areas of the country could, for now, fill the gap left by the abolition of the Social Fund.
A longer-term way forward is setting, as the Joseph Rowntree Fund proposes, a destitution standard below which no one should fall. Another way is to remove one major cause of debt and families falling deeper into poverty – the five-week wait for social security benefits – and also a further change in the deductions regime, to be more realistic about what families subject to deductions can actually pay without falling further into poverty.
A long-term solution like the restitution of the National Social Fund awaits legislation, but if we are to end the need for food banks, as the Labour 2024 manifesto promised, it should be the subject of a recommendation from the Child Poverty Review. The need is urgent, we cannot wait, and all those who can make a contribution – local and national government, charities, foundations and companies – should come together in a new partnership to ensure a national strategy for crisis support in the country. Each has something to offer and we can achieve together more than we can ever do in isolation. There is no shortage of will to act, no compassion fatigue when it comes to helping children flourish, and destitution in Britain can swiftly be brought to an end.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight on Child Poverty supplement, of 23 May 2025, guest edited by Gordon Brown.
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