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The government's benefit reforms are forcing some of Britain's poorest people to use food banks - despite all official denials.
According to a report by Sheffield University researcher Hannah Lambie-Mumford cited in today's Guardian, the link is now proven, despite a recent official government report reiterating that an increase in food bank use was not due to its welfare cuts.
Jobcentres are using an official process for referring unemployed people to food banks - despite the government's denials that these facilities form part of the welfare state.
A freedom of information request by The Guardian has uncovered a six part flowchart called 'Food Bank Referral Service - High Level Process', an official Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) document that leaves Iain Duncan Smith with huge questions to answer.
Food poverty has grown in the UK to a point of national health emergency - and benefit cuts are to blame.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, the scientists and public health experts said the rise in starvation and food bank use bore the hallmarks of a national medical emergency.
In a letter the group points the finger at the government's benefit cuts, citing evidence from the UK's biggest food bank provider the Trussell Trust:
A group of MPs has called on the government to publish its long-awaited report on food banks.
The study was delivered to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in June, but there has been speculation that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), headed up by under-fire Iain Duncan Smith, has banned its release.
David Cameron's claim that his government has supported food banks has been flatly denied by the head of The Trussell Trust.
The Trust is the biggest food bank provider in the UK, and Chris Mould, its chief executive, said he was “annoyed, puzzled and confused” by the Prime Minister's statement.
Mould said the government had "broken its agreement" with food banks, despite its claim that it had gone further than the previous Labour regime in referring people in need.
Despite the government's insistence that benefit cuts have nothing to do with increased food bank need, the number using them has doubled since cuts came into force.
The Trussell Trust, the UK's biggest food bank provider, says it has seen a 200% increase in the number of referrals for help since the April changes, and that more than half of these were linked to benefits issues.
The use of food banks has soared since the government came to power, but Minister for Work and Pensions Lord David Freud has rejected a link with the government's benefit cuts.
Speaking in the House of Lords yesterday Lord Freud said it was hard to make a "causal link" between the two.
Despite evidence that more and more people are being driven to use the facilities due to over-zealous sanctioning - removing benefits for often-small violations of benefit rules - and below-inflation benefit rises, the Minister said:
More than half-a-million people in Britain are now regularly forced to use food bank handouts to survive.
A report by Church Action on Poverty and Oxfam, 'Walking the Breadline', shows that "some of the increase ... is caused by unemployment, increasing levels of underemployment, low and falling income, and rising food and fuel prices."
