Guarantee Our Essentials

I wonder what you think Jesus meant when he said ‘The poor you will always have with you’. I hear this phrase debated a lot. Some people think it means that it is inevitable that society is unequal and the job of the Church is to help people facing poverty practically and emotionally.

Others think it is a justification for spending a lot of money on buildings and equipment to enable worship while others see it as a challenge and a rebuke having explored it as a quotation from Deuteronomy.

Whatever Jesus did mean, I am pretty sure that he did not endorse a human way of organising that leaves some people unable to get anywhere near fullness of life because they cannot afford even the absolute essentials we all need to survive, let alone thrive.

And yet this is the situation for millions of people in the UK today.

The Trussell Trust is an anti-poverty charity, which supports a network of more than 1,300 food bank centres across the UK providing practical support to people who can’t afford the essentials, and campaigns for a future where none of us need a food bank. When people are referred to a food bank, they are provided with a parcel which typically contains three days’ worth of nutritious food, as well as compassionate support and advice.

But emergency food isn’t a long-term solution to hunger. People need food banks when they don’t have enough money for essentials. It’s not right that anyone needs a food bank to get by, and we can change this by ensuring everyone has enough income to eat, stay warm and stay dry.   

Food banks in the Trussell Trust network provided almost 3 million (2,986,203) emergency food parcels between 1 April 2022 to 31st March 2023, including over a million issued for children. This is the most parcels that the network has ever provided in a financial year and represents a 37% increase from the same period in 2021/22.

The cost of living crisis and the pandemic are not entirely to blame for these levels of need. Rather that have exposed and exacerbated a longer-term crisis caused by a weakened social security system.

The current levels of Universal Credit are not enough to cover the essentials that all of us need and that’s why we at the Trussell Trust, working with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, are calling for the UK Government to Guarantee our Essentials. That means Universal Credit should, at a minimum, always enable people to afford the essentials such as food or their household bills.

This rise in people going without the essentials is not something we as Christians should think that Jesus was condoning or supporting. When Jesus said ‘The poor you will always have with you’ he was quoting from the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 15.

‘If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be... For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore, I command you, you shall open wise your hand to your brother, to the needy and poor, in your land.’ Deuteronomy 15:7-11 (NRSV).

But a few verses before this, in Deuteronomy 15:4 it is explained that poverty contradicts the will of God. (‘there should be no poor among you’) and in Deuteronomy 15:1 the idea of Jubilee is introduced to ensure that no-one should be allowed to remain in poverty.

Poverty is not God’s intention.

Inequality and injustice are the result of the way that human beings organise themselves in society. The Jubilee laws to which Jesus was referring had safeguards to prevent poverty from becoming systemic and long-term. Jesus said ‘The poor you will always have with you’ as a rebuke not as an acceptance of the order of things.

I believe the Church has a vital role to play as we watch the levels of inequality rise in the UK and see more and more people driven deeper into poverty. Not only must we continue to reach out in compassion to meet the needs of people who are facing hunger but we must also raise our voices to speak out against the systems that are unjust.

This is why we are asking you to join our call to the UK Government to ‘Guarantee Our Essentials’ and embed in our social security system the widely supported principle that, Universal Credit should protect people from going without essentials. This would mean Universal Credit’s basic rate would be set at a level that means people can afford the essentials, and that deductions would not be allowed to reduce support below that level.

Help guarantee our essentials by signing our petition at https://action.trusselltrust.org/guarantee-our-essentials-petition

If you would like to know more about the Trussell Trust and the work we do with churches to encourage compassion, justice and community, please contact us at churches@trusselltrust.org. We would love to hear from you.

Written by Jessica Foster, Head of Church Engagement, the Trussell Trust