Jade is 19 and a client of the Children’s Society, as she gets through a difficult period of her life. Eight weeks ago her benefits were stopped for not attending an appointment at the jobcentre. Since then, she has been surviving on a hardship payment of about £30 a week. Twice she has run out of food and had to go to a foodbank on Tyneside for help.

In 2010 there were a handful of foodbanks in the UK. Since then, one has opened every two days, and there are now over 1,000, covering the whole of the country.The Trussell Trust operates a “social franchise,” running over 400 foodbanks across the UK which are self-financing and self-managing, but which operate to common standards. They all distribute a nutritionally balanced selection of food in parcels which provide three meals for three days.

During the last financial year, Trussell Trust foodbanks alone handed out enough food to feed over a million people, including 400,000 children. This is a 20 per cent increase in usage from the year before. I visited the West End Foodbank in Newcastle, which is the biggest in the country, to find out how they work. It only opened two years ago, but already it issues four tons of food a week. In the last week of April this year it handed out 270 parcels of food to families, couples and single people. In the last financial year, over 50,000 people were fed with food parcels designed to last three days. That number includes 23,000 children.