Crisis Layered Upon Crisis: Why I Brought Blackpool Together for an Emergency Cost of Living Summit

Yesterday morning, in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn in town, I felt a mixture of both pride and alarm. In the room were some of the most dedicated people to tackling poverty in our town. Most of these people work in Blackpool’s voluntary and community sector and all of them are struggling to meet the huge need in our town.

I called this group together for an Emergency Cost of Living Summit after my office was inundated with requests for food over half term. Mums told me they hadn’t eaten for days so their children could. I headed to the supermarket and delivered them bags of shopping. I was met at one door by a toddler a similar age to my son, and I had conversations with women who told me how they had fled domestic abuse, were in-between jobs or on maternity pay and struggling to make ends meet.

“I will always donate, but as MP my responsibility is not just to plug the gap with charity — it’s to fix the root causes of poverty.”

I’ve volunteered in this space for 15 years but now that I’m MP I have a responsibility to do more than plug the gap with charity. I will always donate, but we need to fix the root causes of poverty.  What we are experiencing in Blackpool is crisis layered upon crisis – food insecurity on top of debt, a gambling crisis amid huge housing instability and endemic mental ill health.

There are so many good organisations tackling individual layers of the problem locally and I wanted to bring them together to get the whole picture. About 20 organisations came — from food charities like Blackpool Food Project and Helping Hearts, to mental health services such as Counselling in the Community and Samaritans, to housing experts like Shelter, youth, health and financial support organisations, and Blackpool Council.

We weren’t there for presentations – we were there for real conversations and an honest picture of what it’s like on the frontline. I also wanted challenging and telling what these services needed from me as MP.

While there is somewhere in Blackpool to get food or a hot meal every day, these provisions are spread across the town and require bus fare for many at the very least. It’s totally unviable for most families – who are juggling children and faced with entering spaces where many service users are single men struggling with addiction or mental ill health. Helping Hearts, which provides food and shelter, spoke about how it’s tackling this issue with its family room and family specific service times.

“Crisis doesn’t clock off at 5pm on a Friday — but much of our support does.”

Everyone agreed that evenings and weekends are the fault line. Crisis doesn’t clock off at 5pm on a Friday but much of our support does. There were great ideas in the room like starting a WhatsApp group between us all, so if one of us receives a call on a Sunday for example, we can find who is able to step in – and plenty of generous individuals in the room were willing to, from both within and outside of their organisations.

We discussed the regular suicidal calls many of us are receiving that are linked to poverty, how one in five households running a deficit budget every month, how gambling harm is hollowing out already stretched incomes, how poverty among professionals – not just workers – is growing, and how some mums are too frightened to ask for help because they fear their children will be taken away. What is the point of a support system that people are too scared to use?

Organisations there admitted that often we work in silos and a more holistic approach is needed. A hot meal matters but it’s not a solution.

When the Blackpool Football Club Community Trust and others in the town put on the Holiday Activity and Food provision during school holidays, they see what happens when you combine warmth, food, structure and support. Children thrive. Parents breathe a little easier. That is what we need more of – not just crisis response but resilience building.

There is brilliant work happening across the town. Helping Hearts sees 200 people in a single afternoon every week. The Community Grocery at King’s Church is stretching pounds further than supermarkets ever could. Citizens Advice is putting millions back into residents’ pockets by unlocking unclaimed benefits and writing off unmanageable debt.

This is vital work and this town would have collapsed without it. There would have been deaths and devastation without this hard work. But goodwill is not a funding model and as long as this work is necessary it must be adequately funded.

“What is the point of a support system that people are too scared to use?”

In this room alone several organisations are approaching supermarkets separately for surplus stock. More of them were bidding against each other for shrinking pots of money. This creates a culture of competition even among those who have shared aims.

So where do we go from here? Firstly we need to fix the obvious gaps – weekend provision, better coordination, clear referral pathways so that when someone presents in crisis, we know exactly who is best placed to help. Secondly we build something more joined-up – a one-stop-shop model where residents can access multiple services under one roof. And thirdly we push nationally as well as locally for meaningful support. The Prime Minister has already agreed to meet with me to discuss the scale of what Blackpool is facing – we are a large town with city-scale problems and our funding must reflect that.

This is about dignity and designing a system that helps people stand on their own two feet. The scale of this challenge only became more apparent in this meeting, but it also made me more determined – because in that room were people who face some of the toughest challenges our town faces every day but who keep showing up. My job now is to make sure that these people who do everything they can to support our residents get the support they need too.