Tesco gives help to families in need

Volunteers from the Batley Food Bank manned a table in the supermarket last Thursday and urged shoppers to donate items bought in the store.

They collected 484.6kg of food, which chairman Ken Lowe said offers a lifeline to families who have found themselves in a crisis.

“The food will go a long way to helping families in the area,” he said.

“Tesco have a partnership with the Trussell Trust but we were given permission to go down and hold a food drive.

“The support from Tesco is extremely vital in ensuring we can provide help for those families who really need it.”

Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate Jo Cox and Coun Gwen Lowe (Lab, Batley West) also helped out collecting food in the Batley supermarket.

Batley Food Bank, based in the Brunswick Annexe of Batley Town Hall, has seen an increase in the number of families in need of help.

The facility supports households in need with packages of food designed to fight against poverty across our district.

It also accepts referrals from social services and other agencies to help keep food on the poorest tables.

Mr Lowe said: “We are really busy on Mondays and then later on in the week when they are running out of food.

“We had seven families in on Monday and we gave them all a weekly food parcel, which included three meals a day.

“That is a lot of food and it quickly goes so it is important we collect as much as we can.”