1,423 adults and 603 children in Rochdale receive emergency food parcels in first three months of this year

Rochdale Foodbank, situated on Fleece Street in the town centre, is busier than it’s ever been since it was first set up nearly seven years ago.

In the first three months of this year volunteers provided emergency food parcels for 1,423 adults and 603 children in Rochdale, while in the month of March the number of vouchers brought by clients suffering food poverty increased by nearly 22 percent on the same month in 2018.

These increases mirror those experienced by foodbanks across the country.

The Trussell Trust, which coordinates the work of over 400 foodbanks and to which Rochdale Foodbank is affiliated, recently reported that 1.6 million emergency food parcels were given out during the year April 2018 to March 2019, an increase of 19 percent over the previous twelve months.

The Trussell Trust reports that one of the major causes of people going hungry is the five week wait before they can access the new Universal Benefit system and the Chief Executive, Emma Revie, is calling for this waiting time to be abolished.

Any Rochdale resident in dire need of food can obtain a voucher from a wide range of local organisations and charities.

This voucher must then be exchanged at the foodbank for a parcel of food designed to feed them and their family for three days. As these food parcels are only intended for absolute emergencies, only three vouchers can be exchanged in any six-month period.

Rochdale Foodbank is open from 11.00am until 12.45pm every weekday morning and is staffed entirely by unpaid volunteers. It is totally dependent on the generosity of local people who donated over ten and a half thousand kilogrammes of food during the first three months of this year alone, much of it via local churches and schools.

A spokesperson for Rochdale Foodbank said: "We are very short of Biscuits, Tinned Fish, Rice, Tinned Rice Pudding and Breakfast Cereals and quite short of Tinned Fruit, Tinned Tomatoes and Jams.

"We currently have considerable supplies of Tea, Tinned Meat, Baked Beans, Dried Pasta, Tinned Vegetables and Tinned and Packet Soup."

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