I was chatting to a friend recently regarding the current dire situation. We got talking about free school meals for children, and what a good thing Marcus Rashford has done for vulnerable children living in poverty. My friend mentioned however, that when a ‘struggling’ mother was interviewed last week on the 10pm News bulletin about the poor content of free lunch boxes, she opened up her fridge and it was full of gin.
Now, was this mother given the gin as a Christmas present, or is she not struggling at all and is milking the system for everything she can get? Unfortunately there are so many unscrupulous people about these days, and they grab anything free whether they need it or not. The furlough system was abused by some companies making fraudulent claims and then making their employees go in to work. It seems that often wherever there are free handouts, then there will be people taking advantage of someone else’s generosity.
Yes, the content of these lunch boxes was rather meagre. The company supplying them had been given £30 by the Government to supply 10 days’ food for each vulnerable child. However, one mother added up the cost of the food received, and reckoned it only cost a little more than £5 in her local supermarket. There was loaf of bread, a can of beans, some pre-sliced cheese, two bananas, two carrots, three apples, two potatoes, a tomato, two cake bars, three yoghurt drinks and a small bag of pasta. Even if it cost £10, what had the company supplying the food done with the other £20? Hmm…
Even in the hospital where I work a notice had to be put next to the free masks available at the main entrance. People were taking handfuls of masks instead of just one. Bottles of sanitiser went missing, showing that again there are selfish people thinking only of themselves.
Some of these ‘starving’ children I’ve seen on the BBC News are really quite well covered. If their mothers are grabbing anything free just for the sake of it, then they are stopping somebody else genuinely in need from taking advantage of the Government’s offer.
Stevie Turner 
You’re always going to get someone scamming the system. Sadly. But that lunchbox did sound rather meager. In fact, I saw a clip about that on my news. x
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It was supposed to last 10 days! Somebody’s siphoning off money somewhere… x
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Absolutely! 😦 😦
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Yes, we do have people here who play the system. Then there are those who would genuinely benefit from such help who don’t want to be associated with the scavengers. As well as abusing well-intentioned initiatives, such parasites undermine confidence in them and the volunteers who run them.
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Yes indeed.
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There will always be people who abuse any system, of course. Including rich Tories. pop stars. and celebrities who do not pay tax on income registered in overseas tax havens. And companies like Amazon who are registered in Ireland or Luxemburg to avoid taxes. They are the worst offenders, to my mind.
However, it is interesting to see news reports and documentaries where mum or parents are complaining about food vouchers, free meals, and extra DSS payments. Yet they have SKY TV packages, (around £30+ a month) are holding an i-phone 12, (contract around £40+ a month) smoking cigarettes which cost £9 a packet, and the kids are playing on the latest Playstation that costs £900. Domino pizza boxes are littering the kitchen, and parked outside is a car that costs £25,000.
By all means have all that, but feed your kids properly before you buy them. People like those make it harder for anyone in genuine need.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I wonder if the TV companies search these people out so that everyone can see their £25,000 car etc, or whether the people themselves have an urge to be on TV and contact broadcasters?
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Yes, hard to say which way round that works. 🙂
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I think this happens all over the world. Sad but true. But for those that need it, it is a great program.
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I sort of help out a bit at a foodbank occasionally and the Trussell trust foodbanks do have to keep an eye out for those who’re ‘trying it on’
With foodbanks, the ‘client’ is referred by a voucher holder. This will be the organisation they’re working with, that is trying to get them back on their feet.
People have difficult and complicated lives and while they’re engaging with the organisation, be it Mind, Age Concern, Probation or whatever, we’ll keep feeding them
Obviously we have people coming to us who aren’t ‘in the system’ and the foodbank’s biggest and most important job is finding out why they’re here and signposting them to the agencies etc who can help them.
After all, we can only feed them now. Once they’re back on their feet they can feed themselves forever.
I’m in two minds over the holiday meals thing. When free school meals were introduced by the Labour government just after the war it was never thought necessary to have them in holidays. Indeed the first government to make any provision for them was the current one.
Up until then the foodbanks had a system to cover holiday meals which the schools knew about and we worked together
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Ah, I didn’t realise people are referred – I thought they just turned up at food banks. It makes more sense now, and without the vouchers the organisers must be more suspicious?
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Yes there are people who just turn up, but they are tactfully checked out. Also they’ll be referred to an agency, or CAB or somebody like that.
We do have people who can refer but don’t ‘work’ with clients. Such as clergy or schools who know people need help but cannot support them in a way that DWP or Mind can. But Clergy and Schools tend to know people and know who genuinely needs help and they’ll send people to us as much for our ability to signpost as for the food.
We do have a proportion of our population who just cannot cope, whether through mental health issues, basic intelligence or whatever and they struggle to cope with any sort of system and perpetually fall through the net
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Or buy too much gin…
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Mental health and substance abuse are sometimes two sides of the same coin 😦
Somebody also commented to me that if you don’t have mental health issues before you start dealing with DWP, you will have after a year of relying on them 😦
But yes, you have people who pretty rubbish but until somebody steps in and takes their children off them, we have to feed the children.
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Or they’ll go into ‘care’ and come out the other end even worse than they went in…
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That’s the danger, you have to be a pretty poor parent to be worse than the state 😦
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