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Charity food plan fills the poverty gap

When asylum-seekers first started arriving in Scotland they were given temporary support to help them survive while their claims were being assessed, writes Stephen Naysmith. This support was given not as cash, but as food vouchers, with restrictions on what they could be used for and where they could be spent.

The voucher scheme was widely disliked and was abolished five years ago, after being branded discriminatory and stigmatising. But now a leading charity is to launch a similar scheme in Stirling, not for refugees and asylum-seekers, but for destitute Scots.

Stirling Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) says its food voucher scheme is necessary because of the numbers of people they are seeing who are left penniless due to catastrophic failures and hold-ups in the benefits system.

Due to cost-cutting and job losses in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the bureau says, delays in processing benefits are so lengthy that clients are regularly left in desperate circumstances.

Alex McLeish, coach of Scotland's national football side, is to kick off the initiative today, presenting bureau manager Craig Anderson with a cheque from ethical investor the Unity Trust Bank.

Anderson said: "A lot of people are coming to us in abject poverty. They are not receiving benefits very quickly and often can't access Crisis Loans. We were increasingly having to direct people to churches and charities like the Salvation Army."

Full story at The Herald.