Someone cares’: the secret volunteers filling in for the welfare state

In bed in west Wales, with a laptop propped up on the sheets, Jemima is patching up Britain’s welfare state.

The 39-year-old has never been elected or even been paid a wage – in fact, she’s more likely to give out her own money than receive it – but amid Brexit cabinet infighting, Jemima offers something few ministers can: she knows what it’s like to struggle to pay the bills.

Jemima has ME and fibromyalgia – a mix of extreme fatigue and daily pain – and is raising two children on her disability benefits. Heating is severely rationed. “I’m used to seeing my breath in my house,” she says.

In the Christmas of 2012, only a few months after the coalition launched the first wave of cuts, Jemima found herself skipping meals to feed her son and daughter. “I was so ashamed of it,” she says. “And I thought it was just me. Then I realised it wasn’t.”

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It was a eureka moment that inspired her and friends to launch the Biscuit Fund – a charity gifting service named after the rumour that, while austerity hit the country, one Tory minister was spending £10,000 a year on biscuits. Jemima knows all too well that one of the worst parts of poverty is the shame of asking for help. The Biscuit Fund turns this on its head: instead of people in need having to turn up to a charity, Jemima and volunteers scour the internet – anything from benefit forums to cries for help on Facebook – and come to them.

The premise was simple: no judgment, no fixed criteria – just a helping hand for people when times are tough, whether that’s a washing machine when the old one packs in and you’ve no savings to replace it, or a food hamper to get through a benefit sanction. As Jemima puts it: “This is a chance to gain some breath before you go back under.”

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Six years on, instead of the need for the Biscuit Fund fading, it’s swelled. For millions of people, work is paying poverty wages and benefits have been cut or stopped entirely, all while food prices and rent soar. Worse, at a time when more and more families are being pushed into crisis, the emergency local welfare funds that may previously have caught them are vanishing.

I’ve spoken to Jemima on and off since 2014, usually when she’s saving my bacon. If I reported on, say, a disabled gran in a freezing flat, more often then not the local council or social security could do nothing to help. But if I went to the Biscuit Fund, they would have £30 for the meter by the end of the day.

While the fund’s founding members have remained, the team has grown to 52, including a nurse, benefits experts and a tax specialist. Like Jemima, many of the volunteers are ill or disabled – or, as Jemima puts it, “they experience hardship themselves”. (Every volunteer is anonymous, even Jemima, who uses a pseudonym.)

What’s striking is that, as the Biscuit Fund has expanded to meet the growing need, the number of people it helps each year has stayed roughly the same: around 250. Because people’s situations are largely getting worse, and the fund only exists on public donations, Jemima explains the team actually now has to say no more often.

They recently had to vote to bring in the rule that they could no longer help pay off people’s arrears. There are simply too many requests. “That broke my heart,” Jemima says.

For disabled children in poverty, this Christmas is straight out of Dickens

I ask Jemima who the fund helps nowadays, and she sums it up: “poor and desperate people”. A 19-year-old with learning disabilities whose mum had just died; they paid for flowers for the funeral. A homeless man given a hotel for a few nights; it was freezing out, and the room kept him safe while his care worker looked for accommodation. The mum with kids escaping domestic violence; her new flat was unfurnished, and the fund gave her £100 for a fridge. A vulnerable man about to give up his cat because he couldn’t buy flea treatment; until the fund paid it, he was going to have to give his companion away.

As new Tory governments have come and gone, as austerity has gone on, Jemima has seen these human causalities first-hand. She finds it hard to contain her anger, most recently watching the “disaster” of universal creditunfold. “The brutal incompetence of this country ...” she starts, before pausing. “It feels like people are being left to die.”

Charities such as the Biscuit Fund, she says, are the only thing helping them survive. In addition to finding people online, the fund now also works on referrals from social workers, welfare rights advisers and housing workers – in other words, the state now comes to her charity for help.

To date, the small team has raised and given away £100,000. I tell her it’s incredible, but Jemima is having none of it. “It’s a drop in the ocean, really,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like it’s enough.” She dreams of winning the EuroMillions, she laughs quietly, because she knows she could do so much good with it.

That’s never more the case than at Christmas. December is typically the Biscuit Fund’s busiest time of year as families struggle to afford gifts and food on top of the rent and bills. “You can’t explain to a child that Santa can’t bring presents because we need the gas on,” Jemima says. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Over the next couple of weeks, the Biscuit Fund will try to spread as much festive joy as they can – say, £50 for a turkey joint for Christmas dinner and a small present for a child who otherwise wouldn’t get one. Jemima admits that, when things can seem so bleak, it’s a shot of hope for her as much as for the families themselves. “It’s small but important,” she says. “It’s saying ‘someone cares.’”

You can donate to the Biscuit Fund here.