21st Britain: where we need not only foodbanks – but foodbank warehouses

It’s the size of it that takes the breath away.

Behind an innocuous reception, opens up a vast, cold and cavernous space, grey- floored, lit from skylights, with racking from ground to ceiling, packed with neatly labelled crates of tins, packets, UHT milk. Welcome to Trussell Trust’s Binley warehouse – a tragic symbol of the sheer scale of the challenge feeding hungry families in 21st century Britain.

My friend Jim Cunningham, the local MP has fixed for me to come and meet the great Hugh McNeill, the Regional Trussell Trust foodbank manager and his team.

This hub, three miles east of Coventry city centre on the Lutterworth Road is one of three where Trussell Trust bring collections from local supermarkets – and big donations of clothes and food which might have just the wrong labels, which supermarkets don’t want to sell – and don’t want to send to landfill. We have a look at a pallet of UHT milk. It says skimmed on the label – but it’s semi skimmed. So instead of dumping it, Tesco’s sent it here.

Like me, Hugh’s family hails from Ireland and he’s a man who knows all about hard times.

‘Back in 2013, I was running a business with my wife’ he tells us, ‘but when it went south we lost everything. So I faced the prospect of not being able to feed my family.

‘So I rang Gavin Kibbell who started Coventry foodbank and he helped me. I started volunteering, became a project manager and now I’m overseeing the largest foodbank in the country’.

From here, supplies are packed and tricked out to fill a network of foodbanks around the city – foodbanks will all too often run out. The warehouse is offered at a subsidised rate. But it still costs £150,000 a year.

‘Last year we fed 22,000 people’ he tells us. But demand is only going up. In fact, it’s up by an incredible 30% this year.

‘It really is scary, what we’re seeing’ he says and Hugh’s in doubt about the cause; poverty pay and universal credit ‘the driving force’ of poverty, low income and no income.

Off the main floor, the team has sent up a clothes bank. There packed in neat crates, impeccably labelled, are bags of babies and children’s clothes; everything from baby grows to school blazers for families who simply can’t afford to clothe their kids.

Jim Cunningham knows a lot of the history here. He can remember the old Coombe club where miners from all over used to gather to drink and a laugh at the end of the week – the Irish, the Scots, the Polish, the English. Dick Crossman, he tells me, used to be the MP here. A great Labour intellectual. But always nervous about coming in to talk to miners.

‘I never thought we’d see this again’ he says. ‘You heard stories from the war of rationing. But this austerity we’ve had today – it’s lasted longer than the rationing of the war years.’. Jim’s right. On 8 January 1940 rationing began for bacon, butter and sugar and eight years, rationing began to be phased out. Today’s austerity has lasted longer; nine long years since 2010.

We finish the tour with thanks for everything the team is doing. It’s utterly humbling to see. I blink in the sunlight and pause before getting in the car to drive back to Brum.

Once upon a time, this was a tiny village, so ancient it was mentioned in the Doomsday book and was once part of the estate of Lady Godiva’s grand-daughter, who was briefly Queen of England. Village life rolled on here for centuries – until miners began digging the coal.

The Binley colliery opened in 1907 and for six decades provided jobs for hundreds of people. When it closed in 1963, the area was redeveloped, and the names of famous miners were memorialised in the names of the streets of Ernesford Grange, the new housing estate; William McKee, George Robertson, Sam Gault.

Coventry has always moved on. Rolled with the times. Through good times and hard times. The Binley warehouse is a brilliantly organised operation. But, the question that punches you in the face is this: how has it come to this? How can it be that hunger and poverty are so deep, so wide, so ubiquitous that we now need not simply foodbanks – but entire warehouses to support them? I start driving. With a biting sense of shame at what our country has become.