Battle says food banks return to Poor Law days

A CATHOLIC former MP has said the growth of food banks is a step back to the nineteenth-century era of the workhouse.

John Battle, now chairman of the Diocese of Leeds Justice and Peace Commission, said that food banks have become “institutionalised as an alternative to the welfare state”.

He said the move was a step back to the 1834 Poor Law when the poor were taken off the streets and put in workhouses. The move led to riots in a number of northern cities.

Mr Battle also criticised supermarkets supporting food banks as a form of charitable giving. He said the major problem was low pay and the gap between the rich and poor.

“This cannot be allowed to go on, with the poor effectively being left to pick up the scraps from the rich man’s table,” he said.

Mr Battle, a former national coordinator for Church Action on Poverty, and MP for Leeds West from 1987 until 2010, will chair a conference on food banks in Leeds on 28 February.

The Leeds Justice and Peace Commission has been compiling data from parishes about who gives to food banks and who uses them.

“We have been finding the Catholic Church has stepped into the gap left by the removal of the welfare state,” said Mr Battle. “I’ve seen people I know completely humiliated by it. It is like looking at people in a prison camp, completely reduced to nothing.”