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Demand at food banks and child poverty charities in Ben Bradley’s constituency has doubled despite falling donations, with organisers describing the MP’s comments on free school meals as “disgusting”.
On Friday, Bradley wrote a series of tweets explaining why he had voted against extending free school meals for deprived children during the holidays until Easter 2021. He wrote: “At one school in Mansfield 75% of kids have a social worker, 25% of parents are illiterate. Their estate is the centre of the area’s crime.
“One kid lives in a crack den, another in a brothel. These are the kids that most need our help, extending FSM doesn’t reach these kids.”
Bradley then replied to a tweet in which another user said “£20 cash direct to a crack den and brothel really sounds like way forward with this one”, writing: “That’s what FSM vouchers in the summer effectively did …”
Labour MPs have called on Bradley, who later said the tweet had been “totally taken out of context”, to apologise.
At Sherwood Forest Foodbank, in Mansfield Woodhouse, demand for food parcels is “up to double” what it was before the national lockdown in March, according to client coordinator Jo Hays. But she worried that when the government’s furlough scheme ends on 1 November, it could triple.
“We see people on the frontline who are coming to us and they’re not from a crack den or any of that. The majority of people we see is as a result of the government lockdown,” she added.
Hays, who said the pressure the food bank was under was “the worst we’ve seen” with families making up most new claimants, criticised Bradley’s stance as “misinformed”.
“It’s: ‘if you want to do better you’ve got to look after yourself’, but there’s no jobs and people are losing the ones they had,” she added, saying that the MP’s apparent “vilifying of people in Mansfield on benefits” was “disgusting”.
On Wednesday, a satellite branch of the food bank will open at St Peter and St Paul’s church in MansfieldThe Sherwood Forest branch will have to stock both sites at a time when supplies are diminishing as the general public begin to feel the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis.
“We have got money in the bank, but that’s not going to last long if we don’t get any donations. The stock we’ve got would last about a month and a half or two months,” said Hays.
Amanda Fisher, 50, who helps to run School’s Out for Summer Mansfield, which works with schools in the area to provide food vouchers to families with donations from the public, said demand there had also doubled in the past four months.
In July, the community organisation was providing for 200 children who had been flagged by their school for extra support, but the number has risen to 400. “Over Christmas we could be looking at 600-plus,” said Fisher.
She added that delays to universal credit claims, job losses and zero-hours contracts were fuelling the demand.
“We’ve worked so hard as a group to not make these people feel ashamed that they have to come to us,” she said. “But [Bradley] has basically said these families that have got children on free school meals are not worthy.”
Fisher, who said she had been on benefits and claimed free school meals for her own children in the past, said when she had first seen her MP’s Twitter tirade, she had thought it was “spam”.
“I just cannot believe the actual mindset of this chap. He’s almost demonising children because of the circumstances that they might be in,” she said. “I’m absolutely appalled that he is my MP. He’s not a Mansfield lad, so that says it all,” she said, in reference to the fact that Bradley grew up in Derbyshire.
“He’s been quite well-off through his childhood. He can’t even begin to imagine what these families are going through – I can, because I’ve been there.”
Among the schools the organisation is working with is St Edmund’s C of E primary school in Mansfield Woodhouse. On Friday night, the school also clashed with Bradley.
In a Facebook post, the school stated that his comments amounted to a “stigmatisation of working-class families” and that staff “know the truth about families who qualify for free school meals and it is nothing like what he suggests”.
In a response from his personal Facebook account, Bradley asked the school to “remove” the “partisan nonsense”, arguing that his comments had been taken out of context.
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