Successful Harvest Festival campaign – but food banks still in trouble

The “Food SOS” campaign, started to support food banks, has driven up donations from schools but local organisations continue to struggle.

At least 26 schools took part in the campaign, spearheaded by Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, to encourage donations and provide useful information and advice.

But some food banks have resorted to buying food to cope with rising demand and the reduced availability of surplus supermarket food.

Brighton Food Bank team leader Mike Jourdain said: “We get about half the food in donations and at the moment we’re having to use cash to supplement it. Currently, we’re spending about £1,500 a week just to maintain levels which isn’t sustainable.

“We are a referral-based food bank but we’re seeing a large number of people just knocking on our door for the first time – people who have jobs but just don’t have money.

“Harvest is a good time, not only in schools but in churches. But really the demand for our food bank is the same in January, June and December.

“One of the things we’re talking to the council about is relocating. The idea is that we relocate the food bank but also create a café with a one-stop shop where we would have all the support services we currently use to help our clients – housing advice, benefits advice, employment advice.

“Hopefully, it would create a solution where, in the long term, we’re not negating the need for food banks but making them less of a focal point and trying to resolve people’s issues quicker so that there’s less who need to go to a food bank for a long period of time.

“It’s going to be difficult for all the food banks in terms of getting enough food in to manage demand for it. I don’t see an immediate solution really.”

The Brighton Food Bank, run by the Brighton and Hove City Mission, has submitted a planning application to enable it to relocate to the old Lloyds Bank building in Preston Circus.

To see the planning application or to comment, click here for the planning portal on the Brighton and Hove City Council website and search for BH2022/01972.

If the plans are approved, the larger building will help the Brighton Food Bank to meet the “increasing demand on its services – 33 per cent last year and 25 per cent so far this year”.

Helen Starr-Keddle, of the Food Partnership, said: “I think the reason why the Harvest Schools campaign has been so successful is that it has been something that people can do to help.

“It’s been quite a good thing that the community is rallying around. The projects we support are more reliant on surplus food. That’s what’s drying up, unbelievably.

“They’ve always had some donations from the public but the bulk of food they give out is from food that would otherwise go to waste. Those supermarkets and outlets have gotten a lot better recently about not wasting things.