We Have Food Banks, Now A Need for Warm Banks?
As energy costs rise and many of us are already sat huddled in blankets and robes looking mournfully at our dead boiler, what’s winter going to feel like for the poorest in town? Cold. That kind of cold that seeps into your bones – when you’ve been exposed too long, when there’s no hope of recovery. What’s going to be done about it, and could ‘warm banks’ be an answer?
East and West Sussex County Councils are each considering what sort of measures might help people in the cost of living crisis, and warm banks are among these. Local councils such as Horsham and Lewes are likewise speculating. Only Worthing has committed a portion of its latest roadmap to recovery funding to create warm spaces for residents who can’t afford to heat their homes.
The general consensus is that the use of existing community spaces – as long as they too can afford heating – is a better strategy than talking about the scary prospect of newly created warm banks. Councils are considering how best to signpost and support these locations and we’re beginning to see the phrasing compromise in “warm spaces”, rather than “warm banks”. No-one wants to be making the connections to Victorian England that we’ve already made.
Progress so far
Up North, Gateshead is trying to establish a “network” or “directory” of warm spaces, and will offer participating organisations a chance at £50-£500 of Warm Space Grant funding if they prove that they can make a decent impact. Meanwhile Harrogate and Rural District Hospital Foundation Trust and Leeds Community Healthcare Trust are putting the hospital forward as the first NHS site to dedicate a space solely for this use.
London GP, Dr Farzana Hussain is opening one of her rooms with space for 16 users.“All my medical training isn’t going to help anybody when my elderly patient has already got hypothermia,” she said. “I would never have thought that we might face a day where we might get a call saying one of our patients has died of starvation or hypothermia. That’s the moral injury.”
It is heart-warming to see communities step in to protect their most vulnerable, but warm banks (however they’re named) should only be seen as what they really are – a crisis measure in a national emergency. Those truly accountable must not hail or laud their existence – as they have infamously with food banks – but ensure that never again will any basic human need be denied.
Hastings Borough Council does not currently have any special measures planned for the season.
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