Within 45 minutes all the food from this bank will be gone

David Cohen talks to increasingly desperate parents queueing with empty shopping bags outside a school near Battersea Power Station

- David Cohen

THE queue began 45 minutes before the weekly school food bank opened. It started outside the glass-fronted school entrance, snaked along the wall and, by the time produce-laden tables were assembled at 3.15pm, wound around the corner into the next street.

This was a typical Wednesday afternoon at St Mary’s RC Primary, a school in the shadow of the multi-billion-pound Battersea Power Station development but where 50 per cent of the 195-strong children are on free school meals. And yet the bulk of parents in the queue were neither the jobless nor the poorest in the school.

Towards the front waited Shawn, 45, a single mother of two and a phlebotomist who works part-time, 20 hours a week, preparing blood for testing at a doctor's laboratory and whose daughter does not get free school meals. Shawn said: I am on universal credit because learn so little but as my income is above the threshold of 7,400 a year, my daughter does not get free school meals. I also have a second child, aged three, to feed and I come to the food bank every week. I come early because this queue can get very long. I aim to get at least one day’s meals.”

I watched Shawn load up her carrier bag with pasta, cereal, eggs, rice, yoghurt, lemon, tinned peas and tomatoes. This is a good variety, it helps us a great deal,” she said. Shawn had skipped lunch, as she does every day. It is too expensive to eat three meals a day and feed my children,” she added. A year ago I would spend 50 a week on groceries, now that has doubled.”