The Trussell Trust’s misleading figures on food bank usage help no one

A day after the BBC admitted to misquoting David Cameron on foxhunting, the broadcaster made another admission of error last night over the numbers of people using food banks. A Newsnight package on welfare initially declared that ‘numbers using food banks will hit a million this week’, but this figure was clarified with a short correction at the end of the programme:

‘In our welfare discussion we said there were a million people estimated to use food banks. There were actually a million uses by a smaller number of people than that.’

The flagship current affairs show wasn’t the only operation to make the mistake, which is based on a Trussell Trust press release titled ‘Foodbank use tops one million for the first time’.