Prior to 2000, foodbanks were a foreign concept to the UK. Just over 20 years later, and there are more foodbanks in operation today than there are McDonalds, Starbucks or Wetherspoons. What began as a small provision of emergency support to a local community has grown into a sadly accepted part of life in the UK that is present in almost every area of the country and shows no signs of becoming uneeded in the near future. Non-profit organisations across the country work tirelessly to distribute emergency food to those who need it most, acting as a lifeline for people often in desperate need of support. This is all in aid of a single main goal – ensuring that no one goes hungry in the UK.

Morecambe Bay Foodbank is one such organisation, acting as an emergency food provider as part of The Trussell Trust - which operates more than 1300 foodbanks within its franchise – since 2012. The foodbank works on a referral model, taking emergency food referrals from referral agents in the community such as Citizens’ Advice, Lancaster City Council, and local schools. Each referral receives a 3-day emergency food parcel, and can do so 3 times every 6 months in non-pandemic conditions. All food and provisions are sourced from donations from the community, either in the form of food directly donated or from financial contributions.

My work with the foodbank began in 2018. After enquiring with a few charities about some volunteering work, the foodbank invited me along as a volunteer. Within a couple of months, the manager Annette Smith learned of my Statistics background and asked me to take a look at their data system, and we’ve been working together ever since. During that time, the foodbank has had to shift its operations from an in person food collection and support point to a delivery model. Due to the economic impacts of the pandemic, the foodbank began working with Lancaster City Council at the start of the pandemic to deliver emergency food to people across the district, delivering food to over 2000 people in a single week at its peak in April 2020. Although demand has now decreased from peak levels, even at the later stages of the pandemic in 2022 the foodbank is distributing more food than the same month before the pandemic in 2020. This also matches the previous consistent year on year increases seen since 2012.

The work with the foodbank has been a very different experience to the normal statistical modelling during my PhD. The temptation to try and immediately fit a statistical model as would be habit from the PhD isn’t often the most appropriate course of action, especially considering the non-technical nature of the audience that will use the results. Of the analysis completed with the foodbank, clear data visualisations – particularly maps – have been one of the most immediately useful pieces of work for both publicity and decision making. The basic goal of any analysis we do is to improve our understanding of who needs further support. For management, often good visualisations are more than enough to fuflfill that goal, and can quickly confirm or disprove assumptions they have about their data. Early on during my volunteering, a report from The Trussell Trust (https://www.trusselltrust.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/05/State-of-Hunger-2021-Report-Final.pdf) was released which mainly focused on basic quantitative methods woth some qualitative analysis spread throughout, as well as a single subsection of statistical modelling. As a statistician, the modelling was the most immediately interesting part of the report, but to the management of the foodbank the table of coefficients was the least understandable part of the entire report. Arguably the results of the modelling may have been more informative than other parts of the analysis, but without knowledge of the modelling techniques the information isn’t easily translatable to useful insight for the people running the foodbank. Likewise, while applying a spatial model to the foodbank’s data is definitely possible for a spatial analysis, often a simple aggregated count of food parcels per ward is much more useful in practice.

Even with good visualisations, there can sometimes be a lack of trust or even disagreement with data analysis. This can sometimes be led by more political thinking rather than constructive criticism of the work, but it’s still a key consideration when doing analysis of this type that is less required for more academic research with an academic audience. Being precise with exactly what you’re trying to say and why you’re saying it can make all the difference between it being taken on board or disregarded. A simple change of affiliation of the work from the Morecambe Bay Foodbank to Lancaster University can immediately change perceptions of why you’re doing the work and thereby what you’re trying to say. Even though Morecambe’s data is clear that foodbank use is still increasing in the long term and has been since 2012 (as in many other areas of the UK), unfortunately often there is less importance on the message being said and more on who is saying it and how it’s being said.

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