Higher levels of benefit sanctions are directly associated with a ‘significant increase’ in food bank use, an academic report has found.
According to Inside Housing:
For every 1% increase in sanctions in an area, there was a corresponding rise in use of food banks and in food parcel distribution, according to research by Oxford and Liverpool universities.
The report states that there was ‘a significant increase of 0.09 percentage points’ in food distribution in areas with higher sanction rates.
Currently, sanctions do not affect housing benefit, but under universal credit, which rolls a number ofwelfare payments into one monthly sum, sanctions may hit in-work benefits, including the housing cost of the single payment.
Housing associations have previously provided food parcels to tenants affected by the impact of austerity and welfare cuts – with Hyde and Affinity Sutton, among others, distributing emergency supplies or vouchers.
The report cites deprived areas of England, such as Derby – where sanction rates rose to 13% of benefit claimants in 2013 – stating that the area saw ‘a substantial rise in food parcel distribution, to an additional one parcel for every 100 persons’.
Government figures have repeatedly denied a link between benefit cuts and rising food bank demand.
But the report, published yesterday, found that each 1% cut in central government spending on welfare benefits in a local authority increased the odds of a food bank opening within two years by 160%.
The estimated likelihood of a food bank opening in an area that did not experience a spending cut in either of the past two years was 14.5%, whereas this figure tripled to 52.0% for a local authority that experienced an average budget cut of 3% in welfare spending in both years.
A government spokesperson said: ‘The vast majority of benefits are processed on time with improvements being made year on year and the number of sanctions has actually gone down.’
The spokesperson did not specify any time frames for sanctions going down in its statement. Inside Housing’s analysis of government data found that there have been more benefit sanctions in the last four years of the coalition government than in the decade before (2000 to 2010).