London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Sep 19, 2025

Rishi Sunak has broken his promise to help with the cost of living

Rishi Sunak has broken his promise to help with the cost of living

For the increasing number of people who use my food bank, the future is looking bleak, says Corrine Boden, operations manager at Stoke-on-Trent food bank
I run a food bank in Stoke-on-Trent, and the people who come in are telling me that they’re scared.

It’s a terrible combination of many things – the fuel crisis, the cut to universal credit, the rise in price of food and essentials, bills and rents, and the fact that benefits have not reflected the actual cost of living in this country for a long time. In Stoke-on-Trent almost half of children are living in poverty. How are people going to cope as this gets worse?

A woman in her 40s came to see me recently. She lives alone, is teaching and has two other jobs besides, yet she does not have enough money to buy food for herself. She asked me: “How will I get through this?” People are beside themselves about what the next six months will bring because we all know this is going to get so much harder – and it has already been hard for many years.

Rishi Sunak’s spring statement promised to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis, but what he has announced won’t make the difference people coming to us need. A cut in fuel duty and raising the national insurance threshold will never be enough to cancel out rocketing heating bills.

People are already telling us they can’t afford to put on the heating. Money Saving Expert’s Martin Lewis is now saying he’s got no tools left to help people stretch their money any further. This is not a case of people not “budgeting properly” – it’s a crisis. We are seeing a whole new group of people coming to us now – people in full-time work who do not have enough money to pay their rent and bills and buy food.

We do all we can at our food bank – we have advisers who try to help people access the benefits they are entitled to, and we have a local partnership with Money Matters that supports people with debt issues and energy advice. Unfortunately, debt is for most the only way through now. As research by the Trussell Trust found recently, two in five British people claiming universal credit are in debt. Many have maxed out credit cards just to get by and are changing their cards every six months to avoid the most punitive interest rates. And this is before something happens such as needing to buy a school uniform, or, worse, the boiler or fridge breaking.

Our fear is that come September there will be a wheat shortage because of the situation in Ukraine. Will loaves of bread reach £5? How much will pasta cost? Over the past few years we have already seen a huge increase in food prices and people are already skipping meals. The same Trussell Trust survey found that one in three people on universal credit didn’t eat at all or had only one meal on more than one day in the previous month. This does not surprise me.

We are so grateful for the donations we get and would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who donates. My concern, however, is that donations will decrease as food becomes more expensive. We have already seen donations slowing – if that continues, where will food parcels materialise from?

Fourteen thousand people have visited our food bank in the past 12 months, and we are expecting this number to dramatically increase. We really need the government’s help – we need our benefits payments to be fair and to reflect the true rate of inflation and for policies to work from citizen level upwards. Benefits levels have not increased fairly for so long that people are working and getting top-up benefits and it still doesn’t cover rent and bills. Local welfare assistance has been chipped away for years – we’ve gone backwards.

Nothing will change for the people on the lowest incomes unless these policies change. Yet I don’t believe change will come until people who have experienced poverty regularly meet the people who shape these decisions. Until people who have lived in poverty have a platform to explain what is going on, there will always be a disconnect.

Social security measures such as universal credit should be protecting people from debt and food banks – not pushing them towards them. The government must strengthen our social security system so it protects us all from harm and no one needs to use a food bank to get by.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
DeepSeek Claims R1 Model Trained for only $294,000, Sparking Global Debate Over China’s AI Capabilities
SoftBank Vision Fund to Cut Nearly Twenty Percent of Staff in Bold AI Strategy Shift
Intel’s Next-Gen Manufacturing Gets a Lifeline from Nvidia’s Strategic $5B Deal
Erika Kirk Elected CEO of Turning Point USA After Husband Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
Massive Strikes in France Pressure Macron and New PM on Austerity Proposals
Trump Seeks Supreme Court Permission to Remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook
Hillary Clinton’s Reckless Rhetoric Fuels Division After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
NASDAQ Rises to Record as Intel Soars More Than 20%, Nvidia Gains 3%
Nvidia’s $5 Billion Bet on Intel Reshapes AI Hardware Landscape
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Trump’s Quip on Biden and Google Lawsuit Revives Debate Over Antitrust Legacy
Macron and his wife to provide 'scientific photographic evidence' that she is a real woman
US Tech Giants Pledge Billions to UK AI Infrastructure Following Starmer's Call
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
DeepMind and OpenAI Achieve Gold at ‘Coding Olympics’ in AI Milestone
SEC Allows Public Companies to Block Investors from Class-Action Lawsuits
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Federal Reserve Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More to Come
Effective and Impressive Generation Z Protest: Images from the Riots in Nepal
European manufacturers against ban on polluting cars: "The industry may collapse"
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Trump: Cancel quarterly company reports and settle for reporting once every six months
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
US Launches New Pilot Program to Accelerate eVTOL Air Taxi Deployment
Christian Brueckner Released from German Prison after Serving Unrelated Sentence
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
×