Foodbank queues drop by a quarter

Fewer New Zealanders are resorting to foodbanks to make ends meet, thanks to a buoyant economy and a trail-blazing experiment by Work and Income NZ.

A four-year "poverty indicator project" run by the Council of Christian Social Services has found that the number of people applying for food parcels at six foodbanks nationwide has dropped by 25 per cent, from 722 a month in mid-2001 to 538 a month in the last quarter of last year.

Numbers dropped as more people found jobs in all centres except Dunedin. Employment rose in the same period by 12.5 per cent. But the biggest drop was at the Salvation Army foodbank in Manukau, where the sampling of every fifth person who came for help indicated a drop from 237 applicants a month to just 92 a month.

Local Salvation Army director Gerry Walker said the main reason was that Work and Income had placed an official on the site since March 2003 to make sure people were getting their full benefit entitlements.

"What we find is that we have people who go into a Work and Income office and don't always know what to say or what to ask for," he said. "Here it's hopefully less threatening. They see one of our staff first, we do a needs-based assessment, and then we stay with them while they see the Work and Income case manager."
The director of the Salvation Army's policy and parliamentary unit, Major Campbell Roberts, said the Manukau experiment was a model for the country.

"The key to the Manukau one is the quality of the person from Work and Income. She is a superb woman, a very experienced worker who has really been able to shake the thing along and has a deep commitment to the clients," he said.

Work and Income's national operations manager, Liz Jones, said similar experiments were being tried at a West Auckland foodbank and at other places around the country.

"The key thing is partnerships," she said. "It's not just us saying we want to come in, they have to want us to be there ... "

She said the agency had put "a real focus" in the past few years on making sure people - both beneficiaries and low-income workers - got their full entitlements, including ongoing special benefits to cover high costs and one-off special needs grants for unexpected expenses. However, trends at some foodbanks not included in the national survey suggest that things may have got worse again in the past year.

Auckland City Mission's food parcels declined from an average of 348 a month in the last quarter of 2001 to 266 a month a year later, but rose slightly in 2003 and rose again to 407 a month in the last quarter of last year.

Waitakere Community Outreach in Glen Eden provided 476 food parcels in 2003 and 733 last year.

City Mission crisis care team leader Wilf Holt said there was a big improvement when Housing NZ rents were cut to 25 per cent of people's incomes, but since then life had got harder as costs such as private rents and electricity prices rose.

"Despite what is happening in the economy, there are people at the bottom end of the scale who are largely unaffected by the relative position of the economy because they are so marginalised.

"They are on benefits or on extremely low wages. They would need some intervention in their lives to make things any different."

Hamilton Combined Foodbank manager Aleisha Holmes said many people on low incomes struggled with high debts. Seventy-seven per cent of her clients, and 73 per cent of all foodbank users nationally, were in debt.

"We give them budgeting help. That is required if they get a third food parcel within six months. But sometimes the feedback from them is that we just don't have enough money to budget with."

The Hamilton foodbank will ask the public to help pay for food parcels by donating $2, $5 or $10 by passing a bar code through the checkout scanners when they buy groceries at the Mill St Pak'N'Save supermarket from next month.