Frank’s Blog

This year saw the continued rise of food banks in Birkenhead and across hungry Britain. Might we begin 2015 with the objective of making Birkenhead a hunger-free town? I called a meeting at the Christian Centre just before Christmas to try to get work underway on this front. Together with FareShare, Wirral Foodbank, YMCA Wirral and an initial 17 churches and voluntary groups, we’ve set up Feeding Birkenhead – the first of a series of pilot projects to emerge from the national…

The work of Feeding Britain is about to begin here in Birkenhead. I’ve called a meeting later this week with local churches and other religious organisations to gather their thoughts on how we set about achieving a hunger-free Wirral. At our meeting I will be making three main proposals. The first is that we regularly maintain pressure on our local Jobcentre Plus to speed up the time it takes to process new benefit claims. We must also press them to make sure they offer emergency…

On Monday I published an action plan with a cross-party group of MPs and Peers to abolish hunger in this country. I was shocked by the numbers of people in Birkenhead, and across the country, who are hungry. But I was also so impressed by the generosity and sheer guts shown by volunteers helping to protect their fellow citizens from hunger. We found that around a quarter of people relying on food banks are in low paid work. And so central to our strategy is to raise wages at the bottom. Our…

Iain Duncan Smith’s latest project has arrived in Birkenhead. I hope its stay will be short lived. I say this both for practical reasons and particularly on principle. Families with children whose benefits are currently managed from our local Jobcentre Plus are now able to claim the new Universal Credit – which seeks to combine six means-tested benefits into one monthly payment. Large numbers of people relying on food banks do so because they have waited weeks or months for…