Food bank says donations are 'nowhere near' enough

Anna Price said there was a "big density" of people living in Great Yarmouth who are struggling financially

Donations made to a food bank were "nowhere near" enough to keep up with demand, it said.

The Yarmouth and Magdalen Foodbank in Norfolk offers crisis food parcels to people across Gorleston and Great Yarmouth.

Last year the food bank, which is part of the Trussell Trust, fed about 5,000 people including 1,747 children.

Anna Price, community manager based at the St Mary Magdalene Church in Gorleston said: "It really gets to me when there is a parent who cannot feed their child, that hits quite deep."

She added: "We are seeing a high volume of people needing crisis food bank parcels.

"We don't like to feed people on an ongoing basis, so we just do a crisis provision. In the last year, we have fed over 5,000 people between our two sites."

The food bank said more and more people needed support and they often saw people who only have a tin of soup left in the cupboard.

"There seems to be a big density of people in Great Yarmouth who are struggling financially and in lots of ways... we are quite geographically cut off which just heightens it, I think, because there is less support and less services available."

Whilst the foodbank, which operates three days a week, takes donations, they also have to buy food to cover the needs and demands of the community.

"We are very grateful for every donation we get but it is nowhere near able to cover the demand so we have to buy most of our food and most of our funding for that comes from elsewhere it doesn't come from Great Yarmouth," she said.