The two faces of Britain’s recovery

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service courted outrage this week after it emerged that it was planning to prosecute three men in North London for the heinous crime of raiding the rubbish bins at Iceland, a budget supermarket for a few items of food valued at a mere 33 pounds (roughly the equivalent of five hours work on Britain’s minimum wage).

So huge was the public backlash that the CPS had to renege on its plans, while the supermarket, which had not been involved in pushing for the prosecution, was forced to defend the amount of food it threw away.

The wider supermarket sector also issued a statement pledging to publish annual data on food waste. The case, and high public sensitivity to the issue, points to the two faces of the British economic recovery. On the one hand, in recent weeks, there’s been mounting signs that the Government’s tough austerity regime of spending and welfare cuts is paying off: According to data published earlier this week, the economy grew 1.9 per cent in 2013, while industry body, the CBI, said that in the past three months, the economy grew at the fastest rate since the financial crash in late 2007.

And according to the IMF’s latest global growth forecast, Britain is set to outperform Europe’s other major economies, including Germany, growing by 2.4 per cent and 2.2 per cent, respectively, in 2014 and 2015. The country’s unemployment rate has also fallen in the past three months, down 167,000 to 2.32 million (or 7.1 per cent from over 8 per cent a year ago). All evidence that the Government’s “long-term plan is working,” Chancellor George Osborne told the House of Commons.

Yet, the headline figures mask a number of worrying trends, which suggest that this “recovery” has not been shared across society, and that the Government’s austerity regime has a far less palatable side. One particularly powerful indicator is the rising resort to food banks — centres that provide people with free emergency food to feed their families.

The Trussel Trust, a major food bank provider, said the number of people using food banks tripled in the last two years, and estimates that three new food banks are opening every week across the country.

According to Oxfam, one in five Britons lives below the official poverty line. Homelessness charity Shelter has repeatedly warned about the rising risk of homelessness, with one in eleven Britons struggling to pay their mortgage or rent last month. Household debt is now at its highest level since records began, according to Bank of England data.

Other reports have suggested its not just poverty among the unemployed that’s on the increase, but also among working families. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for the first time ever, more than half of those in poverty live in a working family. So far, however, there are few signs of Government action on the second face of the recovery.

Responding to a report just published by the Council of Europe on Britain’s adherence to the European Social Charter, which pointed to “manifestly inadequate” provision of social welfare, the Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith declared that verdict “lunacy.”