Mail goes undercover at the food banks
- and doesn't talk to a single customer

Sunday 20 April, 2014
Sunday morning Twitter is usually a mix of hangovers, "I'm on the radio at 10 o'clock", Ambridge commentary and pictures of kittens.

Today it was a stream of anti-Mail outrage. 

The paper had conducted an investigation of food banks in the light of the Trussell Trust's statement last week that nearly a million people were using them. A volunteer was filmed talking about people being given access to free food without proper checks, that some had received more than the maximum nine parcels, and that "many visitors were asylum seekers".
So not only scroungers, but foreign scroungers.

The paper tells us that it sent undercover reporters to pose as volunteers in London and Nottingham. The result is a  series of anonymous quotes from volunteers saying that people were taking more food than they should. 

Strangely, the undercover reporters did not seem to encounter anyone using the food banks; there are no descriptions of the people they saw, no numbers, no interviews, not a single soundbite. One might have thought the point of going under cover was to get firsthand knowledge, not to report hearsay from others doing the same job as you. 

Or maybe the only person to work undercover was Ross Slater, the reporter who was the subject of this morning's Twitterings. He had posed as someone unemployed, gone to the Citizens' Advice Bureau to secure some vouchers and thence to a food bank from which he "staggered" with four bags full of Tesco basics, some meatballs, UHT milk, baked beans and - heavens forfend - an inessential chocolate pudding.

The CAB asked him to complete a form and then undergo an interview with an assessor. She asked him a series of questions about why he needed food bank vouchers,  his family circumstances and what benefits he received. He was told to wait and the assessor returned with a countersigned voucher that gave him access to the free food. 

The Twitterati were most exercised by the "series of questions" line and the way it contradicted the headline "How MoS reporter got three days of groceries...no questions asked". Well it isn't the first time a headline writer has got it wrong.

Nor did Slater do anything wrong in posing as someone needing help. It is a journalist's job to test the system. He returned the food and made a donation to the Trussell Trust. 

What is concerning is that the Mail did not set out to find the truth about food banks, to try to shed light on the arguments put forward by the sceptics and the sympathisers this week. The reporters were sent in with an agenda: to prove that they weren't needed, that  people were using them only because they were there and that if you offer anything free there will always be takers.

It's a fact of life that there will always be people who take advantage of a freebie. Like a seat in a box at the Cheltenham festival, or a press ticket to the Chelsea Flower Show when you aren't reporting on the event,or a trip to the Bahamas that costs you only a few boring tours of hotel bedrooms and a few hundred words for the travel pages. 

Greed is classless. We've seen it in bankers, in despots all over the world, in prime ministers who holiday at friends' exotic villas when they are all capable of paying their own way. Look at the goodie bags dished out at the Oscars, at celebrity dressing room demands. 

The more privileged you are, the more extravagant the freebie needs to be to impress. So how privileged must you be if you'll go through the mill to get your hands on a 16p tin of spaghetti and a 28p pack of instant mash?
The very basic nature of the groceries in Slater's carrier bags (see the list on the right) proves how misguided the whole "investigation" was.

The listed food items come to £26.77 (by SubScribe's dodgy arithmetic). Slater was also invited to help himself to some soap and hotdog rolls. According to the Mail, he emerged from the depot with goods worth £38.35. We aren't told what cost the other £11. 58. But this list hardly seems full of extravagances - apart, of course, from the chocolate and sticky toffee puddings - and there's nothing fresh, not even so much as half a dozen eggs. No pleasures for the poor, only gruel thank you very much.

Far from creating a backlash against the Trussell Trust, which runs 400 food banks, the Mail seems to have done it a good turn:
Tom Phillips reported on Buzzfeed this morning that before today, 250 people had made donations to the trust's Justgiving page. The figure now stands at 3,376 who have given £29,000, plus a further £7,750 using a new text line (text EGGS88 and the sum you want to donate to 70070). And there's a further £7,750 in gift aid on top of that.

Apart from the jolly tweets, the trust has issued a formal statement in response to the Mail saying: 
"There will always be those who try to abuse a system, which is why the Trussell Trust has a number of processes built into its system to reduce that risk. However evidence from our foodbanks across the UK shows that these people are a tiny minority. The Trussell Trust feels that these undercover methods, used by Daily Mail journalists, to enter the premises of our voluntarily run food banks is an unacceptable attempt to tarnish not only the name of the Trussell Trust, but also 
the valuable efforts of the 30,000 volunteers who selflessly give up their time to provide a valuable service to people in real need."
This investigation has backfired on the Mail, just as the use of a file shot of an American girl crying about a worm misfired when the Mirror tackled the subject in the week.
Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron are supposed to be on the same side politically, yet they cannot come to an agreement on foodbanks. 
The comment pages generally reinforce prejudices. 
So SubScribe would like to commend the coverage in the Independent last Wednesday:
It is also worth peeking over the Times paywall to Janice Turner's column from just before Christmas, which runs counter to the Mail's coverage today.
"The misconception about food banks is that you just stroll in sad-faced from the street and some bleeding-heart type loads you with free shopping.
Down at Pecan, a project run by local churches in South East London, I watch a woman weep in relief that her long quest had finally ended in two full carrier bags. It is a system that surely weeds out the non-desperate: find an agency that assigns vouchers, queue, convince someone you’re hungry, wait for opening hours (very limited), queue again (this woman had waited for three hours) to satisfy organisers who may, your voucher notwithstanding, still turn you away.
All that hassle and time expended, the disgrace of telling a succession of strangers you cannot feed your own children, just to receive the grim, basics-range fare that features on no one’s Christmas wishlist.
SubScribe has nothing further to add. Maybe you have?

*While writing this blog, there have been 350 tweets mentioning the Trussell Trust and donations have increased by £6,000.
*Monday update: there have now been 3,812 donations totalling more than £43,000, with £9,000 gift aid.
The Mail's 
shopping bag

Warburton's bread £1.45
Apple juice
 £1
Fray Bentos steak
and ale pie 
£2.49
Heinz tomato soup
88p
Lloyd Grossman
pasta sauce
 £1
Dolmio sauce
£1.80
Instant mashed potato 
28p
Creamed rice pudding 
15p
Long-life milk
56p
Irish stew
£1.49
Spaghetti rings
34p
Sliced peaches
in juice
35p
Custard
17p
New potatoes in water
15p
Plum tomatoes
34p
Silver spoon sugar
£1
Tea bags
£2
Processed peas
21p
Kidney beans
25p
Tuna steaks
£1.39
Sardines
60p
Spaghetti
16p
Meatballs
45p
Chocolate pudding
65p
Strawberry jam
29p
Bran flakes
88p
Bread sauce
70p
Risotto rice
99p
Granola
£3.75
Baked beans
35p
Sticky toffee pudding
65p
Face of hunger?
The little girl on the Mirror's front page was crying not because she was hungry but because a worm had wriggled off while she was away.
Does it matter?
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