AN ACADEMIC who spent 18 months volunteering in a Stockton foodbank is hoping to lift the lid on the levels of poverty in 21st century Britain in her new book.

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite, a research assistant at Durham University, started helping out at the Trussell Trust foodbank in Stockton to discover more about the huge life expectancy gap in Stockton – the biggest in the UK – with men living in the centre of Stockton dying an average of 17 years before men in more affluent areas.

But the people she came across at the Trussell Trust’s Hebron Church foodbank, and the struggles they were facing due to both benefit sanctions and benefit delays, moved her so much she decided to write about their experiences, to try to change people’s minds.

“When the government talk about the people who use foodbanks they give the impression that they are lazy, or that they have drug or alcohol problems, but I found that just isn’t true,” said Dr Garthwaite.

“I found that there are people from all walks of life who use them. There are the recently-separated, those on sick leave from work who can’t make ends meet or people who have been sanctioned.

“One woman was sanctioned for going on a course that the Jobcentre itself had sent her on. She was appealing the sanction but that took time and in the interim she didn’t have any money to buy food..

“Another was a woman, four days off giving birth, who was facing a benefit delay because she had applied for a different kind of payment. She had not had any payments for weeks and it was the middle of winter - she couldn’t afford her heating or any food.”

Dr Garthwaite said there was also a misconception that people could just wander into foodbanks and help themselves – but with Trussell Trust foodbanks, they have to get a voucher from their GP or a Citizen’s Advice Bureau to pick up a three-day food parcel.

She said a recent public health report showed that levels of inequality in Stockton were back to 1930s levels – and raised concern about the Tory Government’s handling of it.

Dr Garthwaite’s book, Life inside Foodbank Britain, is available on www.policypress.co.uk/hunger-pains.