A food bank has been set up by an NHS mental health trust over fears its staff are struggling with price rises.

Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) said it was “concerned about the impact of the cost of living crisis”.

It said it had set up a food bank to support those “who may be struggling to afford increasing household costs including food and bills”.

Other trusts in eastern England have also started similar initiatives.

NSFT provides mental health and learning disability care for people in more than 50 locations with main bases at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, Wedgwood House in Bury St Edmunds and the Woodlands Unit in Ipswich.

A spokesman said it would “keep talking to our staff about how best we can support them and do everything we are able to to help”.

In idyllic rural England this summer, as holidaymakers headed to the North Devon coast, the community in Great Torrington was banding together to stop children going hungry.

From free breakfast clubs to food hubs, the historic small town – once at the centre of the English civil war – was determined no child would miss meals during the summer holidays.

“Last month, the foodbank saw one of the busiest Saturdays in years,” says Siobhan Strode, a local teacher, town councillor and Unite Community chair for Devon.

Meanwhile, a food hub at the Castle Hill Centre – where out-of-date grub collected by Fareshare was left in a larder for hungry families – was in constant use.

“Although we don’t count how many families use the food hub, we know it’s well used,” Siobhan, 34, says. “Every loaf of bread we put out is taken by the end of the day.”

This summer, in schools and foodbanks and holiday clubs across Britain, an army of heroes have been keeping children from hunger.

Against a rising tide of poverty, charities and volunteers are expected to have fed around one million kids over the last six weeks, when there have been no free school meals and parents struggle with childcare costs.

As the nation heads back to work next week, it’s clear the damage done to kids by summer hardship is not just to their health.

A recent study by Cardiff University of 103,971 children showed those from poorer backgrounds were more likely to report loneliness as well as hunger during the summer holidays, and were less likely to spend time with friends or engage in physical activities.

Yet this summer, the Department for Education opted only to support holiday hunger projects in 11 “pilot areas”. This meant 81 organisations that bid for Department for Education help, from Birkenhead to Bristol to Barnsley, saw their funding bids rejected.

This food bank is not alone. A record number have been forced to ask for donations this summer after running out of some items, according to Trussell Trust, Britain’s biggest food bank network.

The charity said 42 of its centres – about 10% of its network – released an urgent appeal for items on social media, or through local media, in the past three months.

Stock shortages came into sharp focus in July when an independent facility, Eastside food bank in Swansea, South Wales, ran out of supplies. Volunteers who run the food bank from Mount Zion Baptist church in Bonymaen made an appeal for stock. The callout prompted a tenfold rise in donations.

West Somerset Food Cupboard, an independent food bank in south-west England, made an urgent appeal for baked beans this week. The coordinator, Ann Gibbs, said a surge in demand had triggered the request.

In Nottingham, low supplies were reported at Mount Zion food bank, in Radford. It has also noted a surge of donations since its appeal.

There are at least 2,000 food banks operating in the UK, giving out emergency food parcels on a weekly basis to people in hardship, according to research that shines fresh light on the rapid growth of charity food provision in austerity Britain.

The research complements established information on UK food bank use compiled by the Trussell Trust, Britain’s biggest food bank network, which collects extensive data from its members and recently reported that it gave out a record 1.2m food parcels to families and individuals in need in 2016-17, the ninth successive year in which demand had risen.

Emerging results from the mapping project undertaken by the Independent Food Aid Network (Ifan), confirm that the Trussell figures represent only a partial picture of the scale of organised food bank provision, and suggest that the level of food bank use is far greater than headline figures indicate.

Ifan’s findings, seen by the Guardian, suggest that there are at least 651 grassroots food banks operating independently of the Trussell network, ranging from tiny voluntary groups that give out a few food parcels each week, to larger charity operations that hand out thousands of parcels to hundreds of clients each year.

Prof Jon May, of Queen Mary University of London and chair of Ifan, said the figures emphasised the rapid rise in the number of food banks over the past five years, and the changing geography of poverty. “There are now food banks in almost every community, from the East End of London to the Cotswolds. The spread of food banks maps growing problems of poverty across the UK, but also the growing drive among many thousands of people across the country to try and do something about those problems”.

Over the past 18 months, the trust has been working with researchers from Hull University Business School and us at social innovation agency AAM Associates to explore how new technologies can help them to fight UK hunger. The trust wanted to explore how data science could help it with its More Than Food initiative, which looks beyond providing emergency food and towards tackling the underlying causes of hunger and poverty. To do that, they needed to know more about the people who come to them for help.

The trust’s core data includes food bank locations and individual client data, such as their names, addresses, ages and underlying causes of crisis – benefit delays, school holidays, homelessness, etc. With data science firm Coppelia the data analysis highlighted some noticeable regional variations and delivery patterns year on year.

A mapping tool was then used to show how the trust’s users are distributed geographically. Heat maps showing demand – the darker the colour, the greater the demand – have allowed us to visualise regional patterns of need.

Data science also looks to predict potential areas of “unmet” need – with the information crunched to show the number of people fed by the trust, per head of population, in each local area since 2014. Various census statistics (levels of deprivation, unemployment) were then used to pinpoint key characteristics of the areas that received the most support. The results were used to predict – again using heat maps – where need for the trust’s services may be greatest across the country.

The model is not perfect, but it already poses the question: how might the charity respond to signs of unmet need?

I do also wonder if there are not more really interesting schemes like Health Boxes which might bring a new and different approach to supplement the crucial support these services provide. http://healthyboxes.co.uk

This article tells us;

The Trussell Trust said three days’ food was given out 1,084,604 times in the 2014-15 financial year, though it is not clear how many people got help because some visited more than once.

It is a rise of 19% on the previous 12 months.

The Trussell Trust said more than a third of the aid given out by its 445 food banks across the UK went to children.

It describes itself as “a charity founded on Christian principles”, and runs its network of food banks in partnership with churches and communities.

Care professionals such as doctors, health visitors, social workers, the Citizens Advice Bureau and the police identify people in need and issue them with a food bank voucher.

The Trussell Trust’s figures do not include food banks run by other charities and churches.

The government’s welfare reforms, including benefit sanctions and the bedroom tax, are a central factor in the explosion in the numbers of impoverished people turning to charity food banks, an academic study has said.

The study, part of a three-year investigation into emergency food provision, was carried out by Hannah Lambie-Mumford, a Sheffield University researcher who co-authored a recently published government report into the extent of food aid in the UK.

That report concluded there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate a clear causal link between welfare reform and food bank demand in the UK. But Lambie-Mumford’s new study, to be published on Wednesday, says the rise in demand for charity food is a clear signal “of the inadequacy of both social security provision and the processes by which it is delivered”.

The report warns that as social security safety nets become weaker, there is a danger that charity food could become an integral part of the state welfare provision, or even an replacement for formerly state-funded emergency welfare schemes.

The leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales says he has been inundated with messages of support after branding the government’s austerity programme a disgrace for leaving so many people in destitution.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to mark his imminent appointment as a cardinal by Pope Francis, Archbishop Vincent Nichols expanded upon his comments to the Telegraph when he criticised the government’s welfare reforms as “punitive”.

“The voices that I hear express anger and despair … Something is going seriously wrong when, in a country as affluent as ours, people are left in that destitute situation and depend solely on the handouts of the charity of food banks,” Nichols said.

In his Telegraph interview, published on Saturday, Nichols accused ministers of tearing apart the safety net that protects people from hunger and destitution. He said since he made those comments he had been “inundated with accounts from people … saying there are indeed many cases where people are left without benefits, without any support, for sometimes weeks on end”.

A mother in Wales has posted an advert on Gumtree offering free home cooked meals every Monday to families living on benefits.

Boudicca Stretton-Brown, 27, wrote that she wanted “to offer a little help to those who may need it”, and said she was shocked to see people from all over the country sharing the ad on Twitter.

Cooking at her home in Splott, Cardiff, the mother of three told Wales Online: “Lots of people wrote to say that they saw my advert and felt inspired to donate to charity.

“I’ve had a few really nice emails from people saying want to help out with the cooking, including one from a chef! It has been really heart-warming. I’ve been feeling very fuzzy the past few days.”

The offer was promoted online by Gumtree itself, whose official Twitter feed said last week it was “a heart-warming ad for a Friday afternoon!”

Of particular interest for RSN members, some foodbanks also run a rural delivery service, which takes emergency food boxes to clients living in rural areas who cannot afford to get to their nearest foodbank. What is clear is that how foodbanks are now a feature in most towns – including Mr Cameron’s Witney constituency (the Prime Minister has said he will visit it “very shortly”) and provide the kind of support you may have thought had been consigned to the past. A staggering 45,000 children have been fed through foodbanks in the last 12 months. No one chooses to go hungry and foodbanks are providing a valuable lifeline.