This weeks blog comes a friend of ours called Tracey Hume who is a deacon in the Methodist Church and currently works as the Newcastle Methodist District’s Community Engagement Enabler. She has also been pivotal in setting up a Poverty and Truth Commission in Gateshead.
We all know that the cost of living is going up. Fuel bills, cost of petrol, food, and so on. But, as usual, those who have the least are affected disproportionally. Did you know that the median increase in our weekly food shop is around 6.5-8% but the increase for the cheapest brands is actually nearer 16%. Those struggling the most before the increases are now hit even harder. The average utility bills are up by 50% but if you have a pay as you go meter, which many on low incomes do, your increase is 56%.
For some time people have been making really difficult choices about heat or eat etc. The issue now is that the cost of living has increased so significantly but the income for those on benefits has not increased, in fact, the £20 uplift introduced in Lockdown was removed in October and wages, in real terms, have not really risen. On a news programme this week I heard of a family who had had to sell all their furniture in order to pay their fuel bill! That’s not a choice, that’s destitution. What happens when their next bill comes in? We are all having to make choices about how we spend our money at the moment but probably not to that extent.
This week I was approached by Public Health in Gateshead because they have a pot of money given by the Government which they want to use for “Warm Places”. These are community spaces where people can go to get warm, get a hot drink and maybe a hot meal. They are keen that the faith sector be involved. I am exploring places where this might work (despite the church’s own concerns about how they will pay their fuel bills for large, energy-inefficient buildings) but part of me wanted to cry, “What has our country come to that warm spaces are needed?”
The oft-quoted Martin Luther King Junior once said this:
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”
Shane Claiborne and his friend John Perkins say:
‘We’ve all heard the saying “Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they’ll eat for the rest of their life.” The problem is that nobody is asking who owns the pond. As we consider economics, some of us will give people fish, others will teach people to fish. But still others must be looking at who owns the pond and who polluted it…we must storm the fence that has been built around the pond and make sure everyone can get to it, for there is enough fish for all of us.’
As churches we can often be very good at trying to deal with the emergency provision, we run Foodbanks, Clothes Banks and so on, all good stuff, but when the demand for this provision just keeps on climbing when will we spend as much time trying to challenge the reasons people need to access these things at all? We pray “on earth as it is in heaven” but for the most-part, these folks are in a daily hell.
- How has the cost of living increases affected you and your family? What choices are you having to make?
- What are the messages we hear in the media and from Government about those who find themselves on the lowest incomes?
- How can we help change the narrative around this?
- What are your reactions to the quotes from Shane/John and Martin Luther King Jr?
- How can we challenge the reasons why people are in poverty? How can we ensure that these voices (often unheard or ignored) are heard?
- Where can we find hope when the predictions about more increases in cost of living are on the horizon leading to more people in poverty?
We are meeting at the Crescent Club in Cullercoats at 7:30pm for all those who would like to join us.
This post is written by one of our many friends. At BeachcomberFX we love to hear what others have to say and are always on the lookout for people who want to share their thoughts or stories with us.
