The Trussell Trust confirmed to us from its own research that: “analysis of 38 foodbanks in our network that have been in full Universal Credit rollout areas for a year or more shows that these projects experienced an increase of 52% in the twelve months following the full rollout date in their area.”
The Trust said it added up data from individual food banks in areas of the UK where Universal Credit had been rolled out and compared the change in usage after a year. The average increase was 52%.
Meanwhile using a random sample of 247 food banks in areas without Universal Credit, or those where the rollout had only just started (for at most three months) the average increase was 13% over equivalent periods. We don’t know how these averages vary across different food banks.
