The two charities have calculated the weekly cost of a basic existence to be £120 for a single adult and £200 for a couple, based on a basket of goods and services including food, energy, travel, mobile phone and internet use, as well as smaller items such as toothpaste and washing-up liquid.
That includes £67 a week for food and non-alcoholic drinks for a childless couple.
Average spending across all households for food and non-alcoholic drinks is £69.20.
The absolute minimum spend is 97% of median spend? Fuck off.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and the food bank network the Trussell Trust said inadequate benefits were the main driver of the explosion in destitution and food bank use in recent months,
Aren’t food banks simply that wondrous thing?
Yesterday I learned that salad in winter is essential to welfare. Today I learn that life is intolerable without a mobile phone and internet access. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s lesson.
As I always say, whenever people cite the number of UK foodbanks as evidence of a problem: I’m glad I live in a country like the UK, with 2,000 foodbanks, than a country like Venezuela, with none.
“Average spending across all households for food and non-alcoholic drinks is £69.20.”
A tenner a day: presumably “households” vary in size from one person to many? I could manage on a tenner a day: I must have done so often (inflation-corrected) when I was a young adult. I’d find it tight for two though, I think, unless we ate a lot of tatties, rice, pasta, or nasty bread; doable though, at least in a cheaper part of the country.
I really wouldn’t like to try it for three or more. Yet presumably people do while enjoying booze and fags too.
Or, perhaps, the figures are bollocks anyway: I mean, how can anyone discover such a fact? I know, it’s the ONS, those bastards who lie about Covid so much. Consider this mini-rant by the blogger who writes as John Dee:
As a former UK government PSO/G7 scientist and section leader for a policy area my work sometimes pushed me in the direction of the ONS, and so I would attend high level meetings at their offices, chewing over the numerical fat with PSO/PEO/G7 types from their end. Planning the 2001 census was one such area of work, along with development of work streams and outputs across a variety of topics. So when I say the quality of the datafile released to the public five days ago matches that expected from a rookie SO/EO then, as a former gov-bod, I know what I’m talking about. There’s no way a datafile on such a hot topic would be released to the public without the scrutiny of the G7 in charge, who would be clearing release with appropriate Assistant Secretaries. Absolutely nothing would be left to chance, and especially so with a datafile this explosive. I can only conclude that we are witnessing deliberate acts of obfuscation that will invariably be covered by the Official Secrets Act (even though I left government service years ago the OSA still binds me). The clever part of this is that public-facing officers at ONS would not necessarily be aware of all that is going on, this typically being on a strict need-to-know basis.
£67 a week for just food? My wife and spend £30-£40/week on food. When I’m buying my lunch at work, and if I did it all week, then it might approach £67.
dearieme – fine rant from the man assuming the name of an occultist/alchemist of the Elizabethan age. I think grade 7 is a fairly humble animal in the bureaucratic fauna and even Assistant Secretaries (G4?) are only middle management.
As for the OSA, its provisions remain effective somewhat longer than a Pfizer jab but having signed and left the civil service “years ago” it can only still apply to the pathologically self-important.
The variance between NIMS and ONS (out-of)data is evidence enough that ONS figures are at best misleading.
@TMB: his case is not that the ONS data are misleading – that’s been established by various analysts – but that they are conscious lies. That’s why his experience in the civil service is useful – he can say that his experience lets him rule out mere incompetence. To an outsider like me that’s useful information.
Once I know they’ll happily lie on life-and-death stuff why should I believe them on anything else?
“Today I learn that life is intolerable without a mobile phone and internet access.”
It is over here though, as everything official and bureaucratic happens online, and online only.
So yeah.. internet access and a mobile phone has become a Must.
Mind.. If you set your targets low/bare minimum, you can have both here for about €25 a month, so…..
A question I put to my nephews when it looked like a power cut was coming:
If the electric goes off and you have 2 hypothetical choices when picked up from school – 1. Travel 10km to a house with no internet&mobile, but which does have light, heat, terrestrial tv and radio and you’ll get a good meal or 2. Travel 10km the other way to a friend’s house with internet&mobile but it’s dark, cold and you don’t eat this evening.
They didn’t even think for a second.
The median size of household is two people so the comparison is not as outrageous as it would seem if you were comparing the £67 for two people with the average or median for the average-sized household (2.4 persons).
Nevertheless it is clearly ridiculous to say more than one-third of two person households are spending on food less than is needed for a basic existence. How many people do we see who are suffering from malnutrition to the extent that they look “starved”? Virtually none.