Food banks

I'd never heard of the Trussel Trust until today. I'd heard of foodbanks but not the people who appear to be behind the organising of a lot of them. So off I clicked to their website, where I read the following blurb.

"The Trussell Trust works to empower local communities to combat poverty and exclusion in the UK and Bulgaria. We work with the people that society forgets, providing practical help through sustainable projects and enabling each person to realise that they are valued. Our vision is to build communities where people of all backgrounds are included and have the opportunity to live in dignity with hope for the future."

It continues with references to religion but the cool feature of their website is the map. Maps like these are now incredibly simple to set up. You just create a google my map and then add place marks. You can add text and links to the map and embed them in web pages. They are simple but very effective.

Food banks in Wales (green) under development (purple) Share via twitter | facebook

Once again we see a poverty map of Wales where most of Wales is fairly sparsely represented but the valleys are teaming with the kind of social injustice that should not be present in a modern developed nation.

To satisfy my own curiosity I took a map of the Senedd constituencies and overlaid it on the above map. I added some transparency to the layer in order for the foodbank locations to show through. I wasn't surprised with the results.

Does poverty breed Labour or do Labour breed poverty? Share via twitter | facebook

As with child poverty it's the valleys and north east that have the most food banks. But then these are also the most densely populated areas. Is there any correlation? It's hard to say really since most constituencies appear to have at least one food bank with exception to Torfaen, Merthyr and Islwyn that have two. All three of these are Labour. So does poverty breed Labour or does Labour breed poverty, or perhaps it's a bit of both?

Note the graphics have been made by myself from the Trussel Trust website, if there are inaccuracies then please contact them to have the map updated. If they fail to update their maps with the food banks that are missing (apparently the oldest food bank in Wales isn't on there) then it might indicate they do not want "competition".

And of course it would also mean that there are far more food banks in Wales thamn the map would indicate.

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