Of all the absurd circumlocutions and evasions employed by the government to "manage" the delicate matter of (whisper it) food banks and the welfare state, it is the following that (for me) stands out from the Guardian report (written by Rowena Mason and myself) last week:

The DWP said the guidance had mistakenly been issued by staff dealing with the freedom of information request. It said all guidance to Jobcentre Plus had now been modified to change the word "referral" to "signposting" – even though the process for directing those in need of aid to food banks appears to be exactly the same.

Yes, that's right. The dwindling band of civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions (30k down in three years and falling) appears to have spent valuable time re-editing official guidance, carefully (or as it turned out, not so carefully) substituting the work "referral" for the word "signpost".

Brilliant. Ministers had decreed that job centres did not refer claimants, they signposted, a strange verb which is intended in this context to signify that job centres are disinterested observers rather than players in the growing charity food business. And so the guidance was rewritten. Except one "referral" was, it seems, missed (it's ok guys, it was only the headline, in large bold type), and it seems this corrupted version was mistakenly sent out.

My twitter feed was alive the other day with highly finessed attempts to distinguish between the two words. But all seemed ultimately to be in agreement: in practice there was no distinction; the referral/signposting was made with the same end in mind: to secure charity aid for vulnerable citizens the state was not prepared to provide formal support for.

Should we be surprised at the DWP's food banks delusion? Probably not, and it should not, I suppose, come as a surprise to see that a department whose ministers says food parcel suppliers have nothing to do with the welfare state has at the same time issued several pages of guidance setting out in great detail the protocols by which jobcentre staff should deal with food banks.

Food bank volunteers have few doubts why jobcentre staff refer/signpost to food banks. One I spoke to last year told me told me that he had banned the local job centre from making referrals (in anticipation of an unwanted flood of demand) but claimants arrived anyway, clutching photocopied maps surreptitiously provided by jobcentre officials. And why wouldn't officials want to refer to food banks, knowing that in many cases they had just stopped the income of people who have nothing to begin with and nothing to fall back on?

In similar vein, another food bank volunteer wrote to me last week:

The rise in the number of meals we have seen comes we have noted (and of course have the evidence) from staff working at job centres [and] unofficially calling in at local food banks, asking for vouchers to give to their sanctioned claimants; this is not a policy thought up by DWP, but an attempt by decent people at local job centres put in impossible position by having sanction targets to meet. It is a way to keep your job but salve your conscience and to stop people starving.

The DWP insists that people are "signposted" to food banks only if other options are exhausted. So you might wonder why some jobcentres, which in theory have the option of offering penniless and hungry claimants short term loans repayable from future benefit payments, are so reliant on charities to salve their conscience and stop people starving. The answer is they appear loathe to offer the loans: councils have complained that local jobcentres send claimants instead to local authority crisis welfare schemes (which often include food bank provision) as a first rather than a last resort (for more on this absurd state of affairs see here and here).

That might be ok if local welfare schemes were set up to cope with the referrals. But they are not: they are underfunded and in many cases badly designed. Many schemes also say they will help claimants "only if other options are exhausted". The absurdly tight criteria established by some councils mean that many impoverished people, having been sanctioned or finding their benefit payments delayed, have little or no recourse to state help (in fact, some council welfare schemes refuse on principle to support claimants who have been sanctioned).

The DWP also appears not to want to draw attention to the fact that having scrapped crisis loans and given local authorities responsibility for local welfare, it has now also decided to cut all local welfare funding (£180m) from April 2015. It takes away, it gives, then again it takes away. As I've said before the strategy seems to be: let emergency welfare wither; and let loan sharks and food banks take the strain.

Back in July, the welfare minister Lord Freud was remarkably sanguine - you might even say complacent - about local welfare assistance. He told the House of Lords that, three months in, his "information" (though he offered no further details) was that the scheme had:

...landed well

The Citizen's Advice Bureau (CAB) last week made it clear it thought the landing was rather more bumpy. Its information is that much of UK emergency welfare is in chaos. Here's the CAB chief executive Gillian Guy:

People who need emergency help often face a grim choice between a payday loan, a food bank or a loan shark. The safety net supposed to stop people going hungry is now a weak and tangled web which is failing to catch the people who need help. With Crisis Loans scrapped, many people are now being pushed from pillar to post because of a confused process of emergency support which is simply not working. Too often, people struggling to put food on the table are not told what help is available and don't know whether they should contact their local council, jobcentre or CAB for emergency help.

What's remarkable about the current official squeamishness over food aid is that only three years ago, ministers were proud that jobcentres could refer to food banks. Indeed, they changed the rules to allow it to happen. They boasted that they - unlike Labour - were enabling jobcentres to "distribute" food parcel vouchers to claimants. This of course was the era of Big Society. They had liberated jobcentre officials from the tyranny of statist regulation preventing the "distribution" of charity food help.

All that has changed, as we know. It's worth reading that news report from December 2010 closely. Back then, with austerity still in its infancy, the Trussell trust estimated it would feed 60,000 people during the year. It hoped to set up 200 food banks by 2013. Now, with austerity in full flow, it has over 400 food banks. It reports that nine months into this financial year it had helped 614,000 people, or almost double the entire numbers helped in 2012-13.

Yes, this is where we are. No wonder ministers are squeamish.