‘It shouldn’t be like this’: Full-time workers relying on food handouts amid cost of living crisis
At a community food table in Staffordshire, produce is being handed out for free.
“I need to come here otherwise we’d be living on bread,” Rebecca Flynn told Sky News.
The 51-year-old said: “I’m earning pretty decent money, but it’s not enough.”
Rebecca Flynn
It gives you an insight into just how deeply the cost of living crisis is biting – because Rebecca is working full-time as an office manager for a day service for people with learning difficulties.
On top of that, she has a second job going door-to-door on evenings and weekends, selling cosmetics and homeware.
“There’s nothing more I can do. Unless I win the lottery or get another job. It should be noticed that people are in this state,” she says.
“Local councils, local governments, they need to see what’s going on, come to ground level. It’s 2025. It shouldn’t be like this.”
But it’s not just Rebecca working all hours and needing food handouts to survive.
Alex Chapman is the co-founder of the Norton Canes Community Food Table, and says a third of the people who use it are working full-time.
“It’s mad that you’re working a good job and you think you’d be able to afford everything and go on holiday and everything like that, but in reality they’re struggling to put food on the table,” he says.
“We’re seeing a massive increase in the people that are using the food table. We see them in their work outfits. Professionals, nurses – you don’t expect them to be struggling because they’re working full-time. People who aren’t working – you expect them to be struggling. But it’s across the board.”
Cannock Chase
The food table is in Cannock Chase.
Sky News analysis of local authorities gives an insight into why people are feeling dissatisfied their salaries are no longer delivering the comfortable lifestyles they thought hard work and a good job would deliver.
Over the past few years, Cannock Chase has gone from being a middle-class part of Britain to one of the lowest-earning areas in the UK.
In 2021, UK average annual salaries were just short of £26,000 – Cannock Chase was almost identical, according to Sky News analysis of Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Since then, the UK average wage has increased by 21.6% – or more than £5,000 a year – keeping pace with high inflation.
But in Cannock Chase, salaries have only risen by 8.4% – meaning on average people are now £300 worse off per month than the average worker across the UK.
SEE HOW YOUR AREA HAS COPED WITH THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS
It won’t have escaped your attention that prices have gone up, by a lot – by a fifth since 2021, the highest sustained rate since the 1990s – with some of the biggest rises among essentials like energy and food.
But, across the whole country, wages have actually done a pretty good job at keeping up with inflation. The problem is that the wage increase is an average, made up of highs and lows, while the price rises affect us more uniformly.
That means if you haven’t had a pay-rise, you will quite quickly find that you can’t afford as many of the things you used to.
People in places like Brentwood in Essex, the Cotswolds in rural Gloucestershire, and Melton in Leicestershire, have seen their wages increase at twice the rate of prices in the last few years, on average.
But on the other end of the scale are places like Cannock Chase, where inflation has been more than double the rate of wage increases.
It used to be a place where average earnings pretty much exactly reflected the UK midpoint. Now, people in Cannock are about £300 worse-off every month than the average person.
See how your area compares with our look-up.
Louise Schwartz, who has two children, describes herself as middle-class. After 20 years in the classroom she now has three jobs, working 50 hours a week as a teaching coach, at a software firm and giving private music lessons.
Her husband is an estate agent. They have a mortgage and three cars and together earn around £80,000 a year.
She says the family loves travelling together but can’t afford to go on holiday this year: “It makes me feel sad for my kids, more than anything, that we can’t give them a week away.
“We have food on the table, we’ve got heating, we’ve got cars to drive. But there are definitely some luxuries that we’ve cut back on recently.
“We don’t do expensive supermarkets. We don’t do expensive brands. We do whatever’s on offer for that particular week. My eldest son has started driving, which has then had an impact on my daughter’s horse-riding lessons.”
Louise Schwartz
Louise adds that the family have a hot tub in the garden that they bought years ago, but because of the cost of electricity, they don’t use it.
I ask her: “What does it say that a teacher and an estate agent both working full time can’t afford to go on holiday this year?”
She replies: “I think a lot of people might not be surprised by that because I think people are probably in a similar position but maybe we just don’t talk about it.”
Full-time workers tell us again and again they thought their lifestyles would be more comfortable – that the work ethic would be delivering more than it is.
Heidi Boot
It seems the dissatisfaction is not only what one person described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, but also the lack of what people refer to as “pleasure money”.
Heidi Boot is what you might call the backbone of the middle classes – running a small business full-time called HB Aesthetics, a salon that does eyebrows, eyelashes and nails.
“I feel like everybody is stretching their appointments. People are working so hard for their money and they’ve got nothing to show for it. They’ve paid all their bills and now they’ve got nothing left to spend on themselves,” she says.
“It shouldn’t be that way. But because I see it all the time I feel like it’s just the normal now.”
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The constituency of Cannock Chase has always voted the way of the country – and at the last election showed significant support for Reform.
The financial woes will worry the government, which insists it’s taking action to give workers more money in their pockets.
But there’s no denying the despairing mood of middle England in the political battlegrounds that brought Labour to power.
Donald Trump has revealed that media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan could be part of a deal in which TikTok in the United States will come under American control.
The US president also namedropped Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, as a possible participant in the deal during an interview with Fox News, which is owned by the Murdochs.
“I think they’re going to be in the group. A couple of others. Really great people, very prominent people,” Mr Trump said. “And they’re also American patriots, you know, they love this country. I think they’re going to do a really good job.”
Mr Trump said that Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of software firm Oracle, was part of the same group. His involvement in the potential TikTok deal had previously been revealed.
President Donald Trump speaking to reporters outside the White House. Pic: AP/Mark Schiefelbein
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday that Oracle would be responsible for the app’s data and security, with Americans set to control six of the seven seats for a planned TikTok board.
This comes after Mr Trump said he and China’s Xi Jinping held a “very productive call” on Friday, discussing the final approval for the TikTok deal, much of which is still unknown.
Once confirmed, the deal should stop TikTok from being banned in the US after lawmakers decided it posed a security risk to citizens’ data.
Officials warned that the algorithm TikTok uses is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to push specific content on the social media platform in a way that is difficult to detect.
Congress had ordered the app shut down for American users by January 2025 if its Chinese owner ByteDance didn’t sell its assets in the country – but the ban has been delayed four times by President Trump.
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Mr Trump said on Sunday that he might be “a little prejudiced” about TikTok, after telling reporters on Friday: “I wasn’t a fan of TikTok and then I got to use it and then I became a fan and it helped me win an election in a landslide.”
After the call with Mr Xi, Mr Trump said in a Truth Social post: “We made progress on many very important issues, including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal.”
Mr Trump later told reporters at the White House that Xi had approved the deal, but said it still needed to be signed.
Representatives for the Murdochs, Mr Dell and Mr Ellison have not yet commented on a potential TikTok deal.
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