According to a recent report by the Trussell Trust charity, more than 750,000 people visited food banks in the UK over the past 12 months due to rising living costs.

The report highlighted that the levels of need were the highest ever recorded by the charity's food bank network.

Almost three million emergency food parcels were distributed in the last 12 months, with over one million of those parcels going to children. The number of people using food banks for the first time was 760,000, and December 2022 was recorded as the busiest month on record for food banks, with a food parcel distributed every eight seconds.

The report also revealed that more than half a million people in the UK visited community "warm rooms" over the winter to escape freezing homes and escalating poverty. The rising cost of living in the UK has led to an increase in energy poverty, with the annual rate of inflation reaching a 41-year high of 11.1% in October 2022 before easing in subsequent months.

Consumer prices, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, were 10.1% higher in March 2023 than a year earlier. The Trussell Trust charity's chief executive, Emma Revie, expressed her concerns about the statistics, calling for social security payments to reflect the actual cost of living. Photo by Delta News Hub, Wikimedia commons.