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This chapter reveals how women respond to and navigate through the effects of austerity measures. It highlights the commonalities in women's navigation strategies, but also where and how these approaches diverge, with particular attention paid towards the strategies employed by single mothers. Here, divergent accounts of varieties of austerity as lived come into view, from women changing their shopping habits in fairly minor ways, to the use of foodbanks and informal loans. Ultimately, this chapter discusses five sections of this book, each of which explore the different ways and the extent to which these women are navigating through austerity. It is through such a nuanced analysis that we can further understand both the commonalities and divergences in women's experiences.

This chapter begins by highlighting the circumstances and conditions of participants’ lives preceding the introduction of the Bedroom Tax policy. This serves as a starting point for the chapter, illustrating that the policy was introduced into lives that were already characterised by income insecurity, employment precarity, and ill-health. It charts the ways in which participants responded to the implementation of the policy and the impact it had in informing decisions about moving or absorbing the extra rental expenditure. This chapter is concerned with the impact at the household level documenting how life became more difficult as the extra financial outlay placed a strain on participants financially, socially, and psychologically. In the final section, the focus turns to how the policy worked to transmit insecurity into the lives of participants’ children, furthering the inter-generational transmission of inequality through the introduction of a precarious housing situation which had not been there previously.

This chapter focuses on the discourses around deservingness, choice, and gratitude in emergency food provision. As foodbank use has risen, the idea that more people are using foodbanks due to their availability has become a popular one within some sections of the mass media and the government. People accessing a foodbank are then perceived as the ‘undeserving poor’, seeking out free food so that they can spend their money on ‘luxury’ items such as alcohol, cigarettes, and large televisions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this political rhetoric has had a strong influence on beliefs about foodbank use and deservingness, and can lead to stigma, shame, and embarrassment for the people who need to use them. In reality, people are largely using foodbanks as a last resort, due to factors such as benefit delays, sanctions, debt, and low pay.

The foodbank network The Trussell Trust does not only give emergency food supplies, but also offers emotional support and a growing range of practical projects via the More Than Food programme to help tackle poverty-related issues. The mission is to bring communities together to end hunger and poverty in the UK by providing compassionate, practical help while challenging injustice. This chapter details the different programmes The Trussell Trust have devised and thereby examines some external challenges the London network faces. The chapter concludes that poverty and hunger are often amplified through social isolation. It suggests that more work needs to be done in order to increase collaboration across sectors, and specifically between the government, third sector, and businesses. There is increased need for more community life, and the fostering of social relations appears ever greater.

The 2008 financial crisis resulted in a protracted recession in Europe of a kind not seen since the Great Depression. Austerity policies in both countries have increased the presence of and need for social initiatives such as foodbanks and, with them, civic engagement. Foodbanks are often viewed as social solidarity organisations that usually distribute donated food among people in need. Considering that Germany and the UK have both seen a considerable expansion of foodbanks in recent years, this chapter, using the method of ethnography, examines to what extent and thereby how foodbanks in Germany and the UK can construct social solidarity under austerity. The chapter argues that while foodbanks can create a societal representation of solidarity, they can also reproduce social stratification and segregation on the ground. It shows that foodbanks can generate a public image of solidarity on the macro-level, meaning on the societal level, but may struggle to do so on the micro-level, in other words in the interactions between service providers and recipients.

This chapter reflects the consequences of an established system of poverty relief: German foodbanks (Tafeln), which meanwhile have become part of the basic food supply of many citizens. Even if Tafeln consider themselves as a social movement they more and more appear as moral enterprises. This requires the analysis of the fundamental mechanisms within the economy of poverty, such as the commercialization of morals and the corresponding corruption of values. German foodbanks predominantly find their resonance in the system of economy. On the basis of reliable relationships to their moral clients, foodbanks are supplied with goods, equipment and services. The product they offer in return is a moral profit in the form of a positive image, which is useful in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility activities. As a social enterprise foodbanks imitate and emulate the prevailing economic rationality on every level from local practices to long-term strategies. This encompasses aspects such as differentiation of their range of products, securing the availability of their supply, quality management, professionalization as well as the efficiency enhancement. With their trademark protection and branding as Tafel, German foodbanks have emerged as monopolists on the market of pity, driving off other projects according to the logic of competition. The chapter comes to the conclusion that we have arrived in a society of spectacles in which it is becoming easier to receive public approval for symbolic poverty relief than it is to establish political legitimacy through sustainable fight for poverty reduction.

How successful has Britain been in tackling the giant of Want? Britain experienced greatly increased standards of material prosperity during the second half of the twentieth century, with a fourfold increase in GDP per head, similar to that achieved in other large Western democracies. However, Britain saw an even larger increase in economic inequality than did peer countries such as France and Germany. Increased inequality means that the benefits of rising material prosperity were not shared equally but went disproportionately to the better-off. The modest increase in household income for the poorest families suggests that Want, or poverty, should have declined too. However, poorer households also saw their levels of debt rise sharply after 1999, while the rising use of foodbanks and increasing food insecurity suggests that material progress for the poorest may have stalled in the twenty-first century, or gone into reverse.