I T IS LUNCHTIME in London, and customers at the Hub Coffee House are tucking in to jacket potatoes. Just up the stairs, though, people are going hungry. Folk at the Waterloo food bank wait their turn to stock up on tinned food. “The bills are killing me,” says Abie Alghali, who is too ill to work but must feed five children. She has no idea what she will cook them for dinner tonight. “What I get,” she says.

Food banks spread across America in the 1970s but were unheard of in Britain until recently. The Trussell Trust, a Christian charity that oversees most of them, opened its first branch in 2000. It now has more than 1,200 outposts. Since 2011 the number of parcels the trust gives out has risen nearly tenfold. Food banks are often cited as a proxy for rising poverty. They are back in the news thanks to a visit by Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty. “Their numbers have gone up and up,” he says. “It’s a pretty significant indictment of the situation.”

Yet at first blush their spread poses a conundrum. They have proliferated even as the most common measures of poverty have either flatlined or only ticked up a little (see chart), and as food prices have fallen. There was a far greater increase in relative poverty (those earning less than 60% of median income) during the 1980s, but no formal food-bank network was set up to alleviate the plight of the poor then. Figures are not kept for the proportion of Britons going hungry. But there are two reasons to think that this number has probably risen less dramatically than the soaring number of food-bank users suggests. First, food banks in Britain do not include soup kitchens. They comprise only about a quarter of all food aid, which includes soup kitchens and cheap cafés. “Food banks are a new way of giving food,” says Maddy Power of York University. “But the idea of food charity is long-standing.” Estimates of the amount of food aid are hard to come by, but services such as soup kitchens have long had plenty of customers, and the increase in food banks may therefore exaggerate the increase in hunger. Second, some of the rise in food-bank use demonstrates latent rather than new demand. Job centres started referring hungry jobseekers directly to food banks in 2011. “A large part of this is that it was not visible before,” says Rachel Loopstra of King’s College London. If food banks had been around in the 1980s, they would probably also have seen a surge in demand, Ms Power reckons. Instead, the hungry may have relied in part on informal support, such as asking friends for food. Even so, it is likely that hunger has risen under the most recent governments. Between 2007 and 2017 the rate of hospital admissions for malnutrition rose from 0.8 to 1.5 per 100,000 people. Cuts to benefits, including a four-year freeze in most working-age benefits introduced in 2016, and a rapid growth in housing and energy costs disproportionately hit the poorest Britons, who are most likely to use food banks. When a study in 2015 controlled for an increase in food-bank capacity, it still found a rise in demand for their services between 2010 and 2013, albeit a smaller one.

This rise can in part be explained by a shift in the nature of poverty. Low-earners’ income has become less secure following the spread of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy. Measures of poverty usually count annual income, so would not register a rise in the number of people going a few weeks without pay. Someone whose annual income is above the poverty threshold may still need to use a food bank from time to time. Elisabeth Garratt of Oxford University says food banks cater to a broader population than soup kitchens, which largely help the homeless and destitute. “One of the reasons society is so shocked by food banks is the idea that there are ordinary people in ordinary homes who can’t afford food,” she says.

Take Ely, a prosperous town in Cambridgeshire with one of the country’s lowest unemployment rates. It too has a busy food bank, where some donors drop off products from Waitrose, a posh supermarket. Cathy Wright, who runs it, reckons a fifth of users are working. Recently, a social worker struggling after separating from his wife was referred to her. “Things piled up on him,” she says. “People are working but they’re just not able to make ends meet.”

Nor do poverty statistics pick up temporary dips in benefit payments. Evidence suggests that the number of benefit sanctions, which reduce or stop payments for claimants, has risen since 2015. Four in ten Trussell Trust referrals cite benefit delays or changes. Universal credit, a new, catch-all benefits system, is exacerbating the problem: many users experience delays lasting months before receiving their first payment. It is, says Liz Dowler, a food-poverty expert, “the final nail in the coffin”. Then she corrects herself. “No, it is the current nail in the coffin.”