Originally Posted by
Easy Street
So, please save the exhortations to budgetary discipline. The best way you can help younger people to get on is to write letters in support of every planning application for housing in your district, green belt or not. Be a YIMBY. If you want to go all in, vote for election candidates who promise to support housebuilding. Yes, it will erode the paper value of your property. No, you did not earn all of it.
Spot on Easy Street. Your original posts is outstanding and had me nodding along. I'm in a similar position. AFPS 75, last mortgage payment a few months away. My children are currently leaving the nest, so I am naturally more focused on looking at the world through their lens. At the moment staring in disbelieve at the rents being quoted to my eldest, which will eat all the wage despite it apparently being above average, and that's before we step in to subsidise her food and heating so she can actually survive. I'm also probably even better off, having moved into the 'Veteran' category, which has given me the added privilege of TIME.
A small amount of this I spend volunteering at a foodbank, something I got involved in out of a simple academic curiosity after a discussion with a long serving volunteer and family friend rather than any higher ideals. I think I've kept on doing it out of habit rather than anything else. The other volunteers are a friendly bunch.
The food bank (not Coningsby before anyone asks) has been a real eye opener, an education in fact. And I’d like to share a few personal thoughts based on my experiences. Some that come through our doors are veterans, though I have not yet had a currently serving, well that I am aware of.
There are certainly the ones who come through the doors who reinforce some of the usual images – ‘the entitled’, the ‘druggies’, the 'benefit families', the ‘homeless alcoholic in the park’. I am also sure there is someone somewhere fulfilling the Daily Mail wet dream of having a large tv, Pitbull, and smoking all 100 fags a day. But my experience is most are trying their best for their families while being in a metaphorical hole of xxxx that is very difficult to get out of. Or increasingly more common, those who are so deep in the hole they’ve either given up or are in the process of doing so. In a social system that whatever your political beliefs, is simply not fit for purpose (and this is from someone with traditional ‘small c’, conservative views).
The hardest hitting are those that you realise if you'd been ‘in their boots’ you'd have ended up exactly in the same place. And this is particularly true of the youth.
There is plenty of research out there on why people end up using foodbanks but my experience is it's usually more complex than a newspaper headline. Some are obvious cliff edge events and their ongoing aftermath, such as catastrophic illness or accident, relationship breakdown, unemployment, business failure, or even more unusual ones like a complex fraud that takes everything (and I mean everything). Some are an amalgamation of bad luck on top of bad luck. The slow descents are the worst - so slow they don't even notice until they hit the bottom facing the door of the foodbank. You spot them outside - embarrassed, initially too proud to come in. They are usually apologetic and overly thankful, or the opposite, carrying a bravado that quickly dissolves. Some had saved for the future - but it wasn’t enough under the weight of cancer, or death of their lifelong partner, or….. Some are even simpler than this; for example, we are getting more pensioners who simply cannot survive on their pensions.
You also quickly learn that parts of the system that are meant to support them are not just counter-productive but sometimes simply vile. For example, people on basic benefits who have had payments stopped because DWP suddenly decide they are in overpayment, often the result of a mistake, leaving these people at short notice having nothing, even if they believe the DWP have got it wrong. Alternatively, a particular nasty, recently banned, practice that a lady in dire need told me of where her energy company deducting a large percentage of emergency Government smart metre vouchers direct from her meter as a debt repayment rather than its intended purpose of actually heating the home, which included young children. And this was during the depths of last winter.
The veterans are the ones I find easiest to spot, regardless of age. And the ones I put the ‘staff only’ kettle on for. The reasons for them being there, like those already mentioned, are counterintuitively both complex and simple at the same time. To put it another way, there are as many reasons as veterans and civilians combined. I find it easier to empathise with ones of my age – at my age a great conversation can be had of shared ailments! But a particular group that I’d like to highlight are the younger veterans who inevitably have served short periods and have not really transitioned to civilian life. What I'd call the Tommy’s of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. You can signpost all you like, but some seem to have had such an unpleasant experience of service life, and sometimes the charities themselves and the aftermath, that they are simply distrustful of any support.
So what is the point of my ramble. My late father always said, ‘don’t judge anyone until you’ve tried to walk in their boots’. The fact servicemen apparently need food banks at Coningsby, though abhorrent seems to me to be missing the main point that there should be no need for a food bank in the 21st Century at all. But it’s not something the Government can take sole blame for. Servicemen using foodbanks is also a failure of military leadership but we are all to blame. A little compassion and self-reflection goes a very long way