Recently I was shocked to learn that there has been a massive rise in
the number of London’s hungry who have been criminalised and jailed for
stealing in order to eat. From a freedom of information request, I can confirm that
the majority of cases pertain to the hungry and homeless taking waste food from
supermarket bins. Where will this end?
It is only a matter of time before the homeless are jailed and
criminalised for their failure to find a home and for causing an offence by
sleeping on London’s streets. The way
the legal system in the UK is moving and the way in which the poorest and the most
in need are being criminalised and jailed, quietly without a thought or
political comment or even a murmur of public concern, is an outrage.
When I wrote my book Food Bank
Britain I was appalled to learn of the staggering number of hungry people
who had been jailed for stealing food to eat. Through the freedom of
information act, I was able to ascertain that in 2016 two million people had
been sanctioned and criminalised for stealing food in order to feed
themselves. How is this justifiable when
our prisons are full to bursting? Government
cuts have resulted in vastly reduced budgets for those services and support
services that help the poorest in our society.
The knock-on effect, as demonstrated above, has led to people being
driven to steal rather than starve and consequently arrested and incarcerated. Hence there has been a rise in the prison
population, for which the cuts are directly responsible. The sad fact of the matter is, it is the most
vulnerable in our society who suffer and end up behind bars, not the bankers
who caused the financial crisis (which resulted in the cuts) in the first place. The initial public anger regarding these
matters did lead to some comment but sadly, going by my latest results via the
freedom of information request route, little has changed.
This January I tried to secure the figures for the number of hungry who
were jailed for stealing to eat. This was
no easy task because I came up against a wall of silence. I ultimately had to
accept the police’s position that the cost of responding to my freedom of
information request would be greater than £600, which is the budget allocated
to each request. However, thanks to one
helpful official, I was fortunate enough to be able to secure the London
figures, borough by borough, which are referred to in this article.
police to issue the offender with a caution and direct them to the
nearest food bank. Is it not a waste of
the tax-payer’s money to arrest and charge the most vulnerable in our
society? Would it not be a better
solution to find these people help rather than putting them through the courts
and ultimately into our over crowded prisons?
Yet a further freedom of information request informed me that between 1st
January and 31st December 2016, 2,823 people had been “proceeded
against with a charge or summons where food property was stolen.”
.
The position in which London finds itself, with vast numbers arrested
for stealing food, clearly shows a lack of understanding of the issues or any
sense of cohesion or consistency when it comes to dealing with them. For
example, Camden is the number one borough for criminalising its poor with 134
souls suffering in 2016. Compare this
with the least affected area, Kingston-upon-Thames, where just 36 people were
charged in 2016. We should all ask why
the police and local authorities have still failed to put into place any policy
or procedure (other than to increase the numbers who proceed from waste bins to
jail) a year after these issues were exposed in my book.
The poor pay a terrible price. Everything
costs so much more when you are poor; your options are far fewer and poverty is
NOT cool, and it is something we do not talk about. Our attitude is that poverty is something
that happens to someone else. Is it not time
to start thinking about what we can do to end the causes of poverty and the
consequent arrests and create a better system to dispose of food waste? Surely we can find a more fair and humane
way to insure the poorest amongst us have access to decent food. After all, the system of arrest, court and
jail, costs we tax-payers huge sums of money we do not have. Furthermore,
expecting the poor to live on cheap junk food costs us again, because a poor
diet will inevitably lead to poor health and consequently have an impact on our over
stretched NHS.
Ray Barron Woolford
Author: Food Bank Britain.
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