Food banks will be unable to keep pace with spiralling demand for emergency food parcels from the growing numbers of low-income families struggling with coronavirus-related economic hardship, the UK’s largest food bank network has warned. The Trussell Trust said although food banks had managed to handle a record 81% increase in demand for food parcels in recent weeks – including a 122% increase in children relying on food aid – maintaining the service through an extended period of economic recession would be unsustainable. The charity’s chief executive, Emma Revie, told MPs that attempting to increase the supply of charity food to vulnerable families was no substitute for increasing financial help to them through emergency cash payments and changes to the benefit system. “It would be false for me to say we can continue to indefinitely meet an unprecedented level of increased demand. The problem is financial hardship. The answer to financial hardship is not food,” she told a hearing of the Commons environment, food and rural affair select committee. “All of our food banks and the independent food banks we work with would be of one mind: the issue we must be focusing on is reducing the flow of people who need food banks, rather than increasing the levels of support we are able to meet within those food banks.” She urged ministers to consider a new income support cash benefit paid to low-income families, and the suspension of the two-child limit on benefits, and the benefit cap, both of which reduced family incomes dramatically. Government measures to support struggling families, such as the job retention scheme and a £20-a-week increase to universal credit, were welcome but would not be enough to prevent people on low incomes falling into hardship. The trust had experienced a “instantaneous and profound” explosion in households coming to its food banks in March as the lockdown was introduced, with the numbers of children attending food banks more than doubling, she told the committee. The shock of that economic collapse – which has seen nearly 2 million people sign up to universal credit – had created huge demand for charity food: “People were instantaneously facing the kind of destitution that drives people to food banks.” Although she said there was no clear evidence that the struggling scheme to provide food vouchers to families with children on free school meals had driven food bank demand, two food banks had reported that between 20% and 40% of new clients said they had come because they had been unable to access food vouchers. Revie had been “astounded” by the resilience of food banks, she said. Many had coped with a big reduction in their volunteer workforce as a result of self-isolation, and radically changed their food parcel delivery model to reflect social distancing guidelines. Half of food banks now deliver food to people’s homes. Revie called for welfare provision hardship funds in England to be rebuilt to support vulnerable people. Just one in seven councils in England still operate local welfare hardship schemes set up seven years ago to offer emergency assistance to low-income families who fall into destitution. The local schemes were introduced in 2013 after the coalition abolished the national £300m-a-year social fund run by the Department for Work and Pensions, but the money was not ringfenced and most have closed or withered away to threadbare levels as a result of austerity cuts.