A councillor who runs a community centre food pantry has outlined the desperate situation many families find themselves in.
Celia Tibble, of Labour, told a full meeting of Cumbria County Council that Northside Community Centre in Workington had witnessed people turning down meat parcels ‘because they can’t afford to cook the chicken’.
“I have a friend in his 80s who cannot believe we are having to provide food pantries, soup kitchens, when it wasn’t even necessary during the war,” she said.
Cllr Tibble was speaking during a passionate debate on the cost-of-living crisis on Wednesday.
The debate stemmed from a motion – passed unanimously – put forward by Cllr Karen Lockney, who represents Labour, that says the council will ‘explore all options for extending access to adequate nutritious food’ among children in the county.
An amendment to this motion was added that is to see the council’s scrutiny task and finish group called upon to deliver on this commitment.
Cllr Lockney’s motion also says the council will ‘use all of our contacts and any opportunity to lobby the Government to review with urgency their free school meal guidance’ with a view to ‘simultaneously increasing the funding per meal and expanding eligibility’.
Cllr Tony Lywood, of Labour, said: “What this motion really does beyond all things is to show that, since 2010 [when the Conservatives came to power], things haven’t got better, they have actually got worse.”
He said that Liz Truss’s leadership would see the ‘same old stuff, the same old trickle-down economics which benefits the richest and punishes the poorest’.
Cllr Chris Whiteside, of the Conservatives, lamented ‘all this political demonisation’ of those who took ‘slightly different views about how to organise things’.
He laid the blame for the cost-of-living crisis at the foot of the COVID pandemic, which ‘imposed on us the worst recession for 300 years’, and the Ukraine war, which had sent ‘fuel prices to record levels’.
Cllr Lockney said her views were ‘poles apart’ from those of the Conservatives. “I’m not going to apologise for being party political because this is a political chamber,” she said.
