The famous line from Game of Thrones ‘Winter is Coming’ is more and more becoming an appropriate description of how the United Kingdom must prepare every year. Within my lifetime it has become commonplace for every winter to see the headline ‘NHS in Crisis’ and read that the pressures of winter diseases and colder weather will push the service over the brink.

Meanwhile, across the country, people are struggling to cope not just on a seasonal basis, but on a weekly basis. Inflation, affecting both food and energy, is creating new and bigger challenges for everyone. Food prices are now 20% higher than they were in May 2021 meaning people are paying more for the same, whilst wages, and importantly benefits for those struggling the most, have lagged behind these rapid increases in prices.

Recent inflation trends have gone hand in hand with longer trends that have seen growing levels of poverty and even reports by the Resolution Foundation of destitution across the country. This poverty problem has been demonstrated in the rise in parents (now ¼) struggling to put food on the table and an estimated 3 million children struggling to get sufficient food.

Longer-term trends in the levels of poverty mean that despite inflation being brought down and being ‘back to normal’ (as Rishi Sunak claimed during the election) planned rises in the energy price cap are going to be the third nail in the economic coffin that drives more people into crisis.

The multi-faceted nature of the economic pressures on people means that people from all across society are having to seek help from the community. Warm Spaces (and their accompanying Community Shop) run by Hyde Park Methodist Church in Leeds, has people from babies (and their parents) coming, to homeschooling families, and people in their 80s.

With this economic situation developing and no major government intervention being planned (or implemented in previous years), many communities have sought their own solutions to these growing problems and to mitigate the impact of winter. These have manifested themselves in the development of food banks and, in more recent times, warm banks.

Food banks have become an icon of the community filling in where the state has failed. Although for people of my generation, it may seem hard to believe, food banks are a relatively new concept being largely unheard of before 2010. However, since 2010, the food bank has slowly developed into an almost integral part of the British social security system. This growth has not slowed and in the last 5 years, the Trussell Trust (the biggest foodbank provider in the UK) has reported a 94% increase in the number of emergency food parcels they had to deliver. Here in Yorkshire, the increase has been even more rapid with there being an increase of 157% meaning the area has the second fastest-growing food bank sector in the country behind London.

Meanwhile, in more recent years the UK has moved on from just needing food banks and has begun to move into the warm bank sector as well. These new institutions have developed as a community solution to deal with rising energy prices and therefore the increasing problems in keeping homes warm. With the supply of a warm room and often warm drinks and food, these sites have become important for people struggling particularly in winter. Today there are over 3,000 warm banks across the UK according to the World Economic Forum with them being run by councils and community groups alike.

However, warm banks are evolving to do more than simply meet the needs of those who can’t afford to heat their own homes all day. A growing crisis across the UK has been the rise in loneliness particularly among elderly people, but among all generations as well. According to one of the leading charities providing warm banks 7% of the population suffer from chronic loneliness and this has been replicated in the reason for people coming. Warm Welcome have reported that the main reason for people coming to warm banks is because of loneliness.

This is something that the Warm Space has also noticed, Sharon (one of the people helping run the service) described how “As months have gone people have started sitting together” showing how the service is helping people make friends and find a new community. This impact has been so great that the church has rebranded the site a Welcome Space recognising it’s “not just a space for people to be warm, but also for social interaction”.

Warm banks are fast evolving in the new social environment to meet changes in demand. No longer are they hubs just to help keep people warm, these community spaces are now helping tackle other problems in the loneliness epidemic.

Across the UK major economic and now social issues are beginning to be countered by community groups. In areas where state support has failed to keep people properly afloat, it is the charitable work of people within our community which is helping to tackle hunger, cold and loneliness across our communities. And with budgets in government departments being squeezed and large increases in benefits a long way off, it may be fair to say that the UK is now a society dependent on the community.

Words by Archie Sykes