For many people, the cost of living crisis seems to have reared its ugly head a few months ago, with the new discussion over the dinner table being the choice between heating or eating. But this has been a concern for working-class families for well over a decade. It has only become a “crisis” now that it has begun to affect middle-class families too.
I grew up in Whinney Banks in Middlesbrough, one of the most deprived areas in England, with almost a third of children living in income-deprived households. My mum is a first-generation immigrant, and my parents had to start from nothing here. They lived on top of a corner shop where they worked for less than the minimum wage. When I was born, they weren’t eligible for benefits. For a while, we were homeless – when my mum was heavily pregnant with my brother – and I took my first steps in a hostel for families.
The cost of living crisis isn’t new. What is new is the utter lack of support to families who are in a similar situation to mine. We were eventually moved from the homeless hostel into a brand-new council house a few streets away from the corner shop where my parents used to work. Such housing is available to far fewer people now. Providing families with safe housing as quickly as possible is not treated as a priority in the way it was for us back then.
Whinney Banks community centre and library, or “the Youthy” as we called it, was the place where I first used a computer and created my first embarrassingly named email address. It was where my mum made friends with other local mums in a cooking class, even though she was already an amazing cook. It’s where me and my brother would spend almost every half-term going on trips on a minibus with other local children or playing games in the sports hall. It’s where I would go every day after school to read an endless number of books. It’s gone now. It closed in 2009 and was replaced with new-build homes, totally unaffordable for people like us. When it was bulldozed, it took with it the feeling that opportunities were within reach. We’re not alone in Whinney Banks – there has been a 74% cut to youth services in the last decade.
When I was chosen to make this film in collaboration with the Guardian, I wanted to bring these issues to light, but also wanted to tell a positive story about the people who were trying to plug the gaps left by the loss of youth and community services. We filmed with Rev Kath Dean, who runs a food bank from her church in Grove Hill, where she can only heat one room in which local children are read bible stories after school. We met Mark Horkan who runs the White Feather Project in North Ormesby. It’s a community store where people can buy their weekly shop for a fraction of the price they would usually pay for it. They also hand out food parcels to those in need and put on events like parades and discos for children in the area.
While filming, we found that these people felt like exhausted ship crews endlessly bailing water from a leaking boat without the resources to plug the holes. People like Kath and Mark have been trying to keep things together within their community for years now, and they need more support.
During filming, another hard winter hit, and with it another wave of the coronavirus. We felt the mood turn in North Ormesby, the area of Middlesbrough where we focused our film. People on the streets were slumping their shoulders and looking down at their feet. We also found that it was hard to get to speak to those who were using the food banks we visited. They felt too degraded. Speaking on BBC Question Time in September 2021, the managing director of Iceland, Richard Walker, pointed out that there were more than 2,200 food banks in the UK, while there were around 1,300 McDonald’s restaurants. Politics has gone cold. Government ministers are visiting food banks for photo opportunities while voting against plans to extend free school meals during the school holidays and voting for the removal of the £20 a week universal credit uplift.
We shouldn’t be accepting food banks as a new norm. People are being forced into using them when they deserve the autonomy and dignity of being able to buy their own food. People like Mark and Kath are doing what they can and their resolve to help their local community by filling people’s stomachs should be commended. But we need political intervention rather than community intervention. I was partly lifted out of poverty because of the help I received through government funding for community services, and that’s what we need now.
In the midst of this, a council byelection was called in North Ormesby in which Mark decided to stand as an independent candidate. But the weight of supporting people through the tough winter, with Storm Arwen and Storm Barra battering the north-east with torrential rain and wind, left him with little time to go door-knocking to hand out leaflets and talk to residents for his campaign. The Labour party had a team of people out doing just that and it won the seat – an important turning point for it in the town. But they won with a turnout of just 12.5%.
If politics wants to appeal to people in places like Middlesbrough, it needs to start delivering for them. Westminster feels far removed from the day-to-day reality for people living in towns like ours. We don’t want politicians turning up on our doorstep for photos to post on their social media accounts to show off their poster child for the ambiguous levelling up agenda. Politicians need to earnestly engage with us to enact change that is needed to afford everyone the same opportunities. We want existing services to be sufficiently supported, and for services like those that helped me when I was growing up to return.
Sunita Ghosh Dastidar is a journalist and film maker