In Godalming, chancellor’s words chime with concerns about housing but fuel perception of Tories being out of touch “I felt like I must be from another galaxy when I heard it,” Merve Topaloğlu says of the chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that collecting £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary”. “I can’t imagine how anyone could say £100,000 is not a huge amount,” adds the 34-year-old former Turkish reporter, who runs the Journalist, a cafe on Godalming’s High Street right in the heart of Hunt’s Surrey constituency. “The annual profit from my whole cafe isn’t close to £100,000 ..read more

With will and ingenuity, communities, charities, companies and government could work together to rescue millions of people An election year is the time to confront the paralysing gloom and declinist thinking besetting our country and, by rediscovering our moral compass, inaugurate a new age of hope. The British people long to feel part of a shared national endeavour. But instead, near-zero growth is giving birth to a zero-sum mentality, a belief that you can only do better if at someone else’s expense. Young people – historically the most optimistic about the future – yearn to believe in somet ..read more

UN Food Waste Index report also finds global food wastage is big contributor to climate crisis More than a billion meals are thrown away every day, in poor countries as well as rich ones, despite more than 730 million people living in hunger around the world. About a fifth of food is wasted, sometimes through profligacy or poor planning, sometimes from a lack of access to refrigeration or storage, according to the UN Food Waste Index report, published on Wednesday, at a global cost of about $1tn a year ..read more

Schools risk being overwhelmed by hungry, exhausted children from freezing homes, headteachers and campaigners warn • ‘If a child is hungry, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bloody good teacher’ Schools are finding beds, providing showers for pupils and washing uniforms as child poverty spirals out of control, headteachers from across England have told the Observer. School leaders said that as well as hunger they were now trying to mitigate exhaustion, with increasing numbers of children living in homes without enough beds or unable to sleep because they were cold. They warned that “desperate” po ..read more

Six-month renewal of £800m scheme in England to help households facing hunger and destitution is ‘disappointing’ The chancellor’s six-month extension to an £800m support fund for the poorest households, used by councils to distribute vouchers for food, energy and water bills, will provide only a temporary fix for families facing destitution, charities have warned. The temporary renewal of the household support fund (HSF), announced in the budget after intensive lobbying from campaigners and local authorities, was welcomed as a short-term measure that would head off immediate fears of a fresh r ..read more

Jeremy Hunt should commit to extending household support and funding free school meals for more children The latest data on the number of UK families going hungry provides an alarming glimpse of the grim struggle faced by millions of people in their day-to-day lives. According to the Food Foundation tracker, one in five households with children have gone without meals in recent weeks, with 11 million people overall experiencing food insecurity – although this marks a small improvement since last summer. The finding that the amount of vegetables bought has fallen to a 50-year low is particularl ..read more

When Michelle Roach’s son was seven months old, she found herself unemployed and diagnosed with cancer. She couldn’t afford food. Now, she is determined that no one should ever have to face that same agony The question is out of my mouth before I can stop myself: “Does it still have its jingle?” I am not the first to ask. Users of this mobile community store, which is housed in an ice-cream van, sometimes ask for ice-creams, too. There is something about that sliding window, with its rounded edges, that elicits an instinctive expectation of music-box chimes and rainbow sprinkles. Volunteer – a ..read more

The logic that such referrals would breach data rules is flawed and shortsighted, writes Tom Levitt of the Fair Credit Charity Twenty years ago, an American supermarket, discovering that its own low-paid employees needed to use a food bank, stopped supplying that food bank with food. Old traditions die hard. Here, the Department for Work and Pensions is to cease referring benefit claimants to food banks because it “breaches data privacy law” (Jobcentres told to stop referring benefit claimants to food banks, 16 February). Some food banks will no longer supply some families with food. The logic ..read more

DWP briefing says jobcentres should no longer issue ‘signposting slips’ over concerns about data privacy Jobcentre officials have been ordered to stop referring penniless benefit claimants to food banks because it breaches data privacy law, in a move charities have warned will cause delays in crisis help for thousands of hungry households. For years the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has allowed jobcentres to issue DWP-designed “signposting slips”, which allow claimants to access local food banks, many of which will not give out food parcels without a formal referral ..read more

There are things ministers must do but also actions we can take to help fellow citizens. Both are now essential Even if the government issued newspaper editors with D-notices banning any public mention of the word “poverty”, it could hardly do more to create a wall of silence around Britain’s biggest social crisis. By eliminating any ministerial admission of our deepening poverty epidemic from public discourse, it has left Britain with a hidden emergency whose forgotten and voiceless victims are the hundreds of thousands of children behind closed doors, in bedrooms without beds, homes without ..read more