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.

The food nearly all comes from donations. There are regular gifts of food and money from local faith communities, there are supermarket collections twice a year at the local supermarket and there are donations from individuals.

Pat, who lives a few miles away in Throckley, is one of these individuals. She has checked the list of things the foodbank needs and drops off some tins of fish, tinned vegetables, a packet of cereal and £20. What does she think of foodbanks?

“It’s outrageous,” she says, “and it shows that food is too important to be left to the market. We need proper central planning and we need to bring public health policy into the food and drinks industry so that people buy good food like fresh fruit and vegetables, rather than cheap unhealthy food.”

Despite all these local donations, demand far outstrips supply. The foodbank is desperate for food, so the biggest single source of food are some foodbanks in the south of England that have surplus food and have “adopted” West End Foodbank. Once a week, staff drive down to Surrey and Sussex to collect food. In the last financial year, they brought 73 tons of food back to Newcastle. In other words, an amazing 35 per cent of the clients in Newcastle are being permanently fed by donated food from the south of England. Why are people using the foodbank? The most common reasons are benefits delays or sanctions, which affect 70 per cent of the clients. Whenever there are changes of circumstances, benefits are stopped while claimants are reassessed. This can take up to six weeks, sometimes longer. Other reasons include debts, fuel bills and sudden unexpected expenses such as a bereavement. However, an increasingly common reason is simply low incomes. People find it very hard to manage even when they have jobs because their pay is so low.

I talked to a number of the people having a cup of tea while they waited for their parcels. Robert, 24, is in a lot of debt at the moment due to rent arrears and the expense of moving flats. He’s been coming for about a month but hopes to stop coming soon once his arrears have been paid off and he can afford to buy food again.

Rebecca, 21, is employed, but also has debts and a low income. She surprises me by saying that she also comes to pray “for the bad things she’s done.”

Dave, 32, has been sanctioned for missing a jobcentre appointment and big fuel bills used up all his savings. “I ran out of food yesterday,” he says.

Kevin, 35, has also been sanctioned, for not spending enough time looking for work. “They told me I had to look for work five hours a day,” he says. “But where are the jobs?” He’s not angry, though, and seems to accept his punishment. “But now I’ve got no money to get the bus and look for work,” he says, “and all I’ve got in the house is a packet of biscuits.”

Robert, 61, has had his disability benefits stopped and the carer’s allowance his wife receives has been cut. It is his first visit to a foodbank and he’s anxious about being there. “I haven’t had anything to eat all weekend,” he says, “we gave all our food to our daughter, who’s at college. We could only give her a couple of slices of toast this morning.” He thinks he’ll need help until next Saturday, when he hopes to receive a benefit payment.

Common themes emerge of ordinary people who are living on the breadline. Many are poorly dressed, in worn clothing and battered footwear. Their physical and mental health doesn’t seem very good. Most are living on a day-to-day basis, making do with very little. Any sudden unexpected expense, however slight, disrupts their lives — even replacing shoes becomes a major challenge. The foodbank manager shows me details of the sanctions regime operated by the Department for Work and Pensions. It is very tough, even punitive. Benefits can be stopped for anything between four weeks and three years. There is a long list of reasons for sanctions, including missing appointments, not applying for enough jobs, not spending enough time on jobsearch, not taking part in mandatory work schemes and giving up jobs or work schemes voluntarily. Benefits are stopped immediately by the officials and although there are hardship funds run by the local authority, these are small and hard to access. Most claimants don’t have savings or alternative sources of income and so being sanctioned simply means having no money to live on. It can have devastating effects. “These sanctions don’t just hurt the claimant,” says the manager, “they hurt their dependants, their partners and children.”

Some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, instead of being supported by the state, are being tripped up by harsh regulations and deprived of money to buy food. Millions of pounds of savings every month are being made by the DWP by taking benefits off people who are in desperate need. This is austerity economics at its cruellest, the deliberate targeting by the state of the poorest in society in order to pay for the mistakes, corruption and greed of the richest

.I asked Anne Danks, Trussell Trust regional manager for the northern region, for the trust’s perspective on what policies are needed to put things right.

“Our fundamental aim is to eliminate poverty in the UK, not run foodbanks,” she says. “The foodbanks are not supposed to be a permanent fixture, they are there as a temporary, emergency stop-gap. They’re a means of engaging with the poorest and most vulnerable in society, so we can organise help from other agencies to tackle the underlying causes of their poverty.”

The trust has a plan called More Than Food, to encourage foodbanks to develop other services. One idea is to develop advice services — debt advice, housing advice, welfare rights etc — in partnership with Citizens Advice Bureaus, local authorities and social services. And another is to diversify into other consumer goods, such as furniture, white goods, and baby basics, using the same operational model.

But what if the basic problem is a failure of the market to provide food and other consumer goods, and enough income for people to buy things? There is huge waste throughout the food industry, at farms, factories and supermarkets. At the same time, obesity is one of the biggest challenges to public health these days. People are not getting the right amount or quality of food and drink. What if food poverty, and poverty generally, is inevitable in a system which puts profit before people?

“I agree,” says Danks, “the way a capitalistic system works does generate poverty. But we’re not politicians, our job is to work with partners to solve the problems.”

So what do the politicians say? A few months ago, the all-party parliamentary group on hunger and food poverty produced a report called Feeding Britain. The co-chair of the group is Tim Thornton, Bishop of Truro and, as it happens, chair of the Children’s Society. In the report he says this: “The rise in the use of foodbanks does indicate a deeper problem in our society; the ‘glue’ that used to be there is no longer there in many instances. “It can be described as the commodification process with people seen as commodities, and the transactions between them are regarded simply as the exchanging of products rather than relationships between two human beings.” How does Thornton see the future of foodbanks, after the recent election?

“I do not want to see foodbanks become institutionalised in our country,” he says, “and I am concerned that some of the suggestions in the Conservative manifesto may lead to more pressure on the least well-off in our society.

“I am sure we need a fundamental review of how our society is or is not working. The founding of the welfare state was motivated by an understanding that all of us are members of society, so I can see that even foodbanks, if not carefully thought through, may become simply part of the commodification process. “It cannot be right that people are going hungry in our country in the 21st century.”

Children’s Society director of external affairs Peter Grigg agrees: “It is a scandal in this day and age that so many families have to depend on foodbanks to put food on the table. Child poverty is on the rise and foodbanks provide many families with the emergency help they need. “The government needs to take urgent action to end the demand for foodbanks and to tackle child poverty once and for all.”

But let the last word go to Jade: “Lots of my friends use foodbanks now,” she says. “Foodbanks have become a necessity and they need our support. Everyone needs a little bit of help at some time in their lives. But it’s not fair that people don’t have enough money to provide for themselves.”