BBC: The young people going hungry in the UK this winter

The sometimes "heavy-handed" use of benefit sanctions has been partly blamed for the rise of food banks. But what does that mean for the young people at the sharp end?

"I'd love to be able to afford some vegetables, I really would," says 19-year-old Yasmin.

"Being a qualified cook, I'd love to make myself a nice risotto or something. But I'm not rich; I'm not posh. I can't afford nice food."
For the last year Yasmin has been living at the YMCA in Burton-upon-Trent.
She is one of an estimated four million people in food poverty - without enough money to make healthy eating choices.
'It's horrible' The counter-intuitive reality - particularly for poorer women - is perfectly illustrated by what she says next.
"I've gained loads of weight since I've lived in the YMCA because when I'm not eating my body stores the fat and makes me fatter. And then when I am eating, it's just stuff like rice and cheap stodgy stuff. You can't afford to eat nicely," she says.
It's a familiar story among the hostel's young residents.

"You're so hungry," says 25-year-old Matt. "But you're that sick of it you can't even put it to your mouth. It's horrible."

The aspiring electrician's prospects had been looking up. He was on a college course but was instructed by the job centre to take a two-week placement at Boots. By the time the placement was over, he had fallen behind and couldn't meet the college's required 97% attendance rate.

And then he had his jobseeker's allowance stopped.
Matt and the other residents of the YMCA say that going door-to-door with their CVs, or ringing around employers no longer seems to satisfy officials at the job centre.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) sanctions regime, made tougher in 2012, means that those out of work can have their payments withdrawn for between a week and three years if they are deemed not to have been doing enough to find a job.
Matt says that when he told the job centre about his job searching efforts the response he got was like: "Handing your CV in, the searches you've done here - that's not applying for work. So bye-bye, see you later.
"I'm going without money at the moment - no electric, no food."

The DWP did not comment on the specifics of Matt's case but says sanctions are only used "as a last resort in a tiny minority of cases".
So far this year the average number of JSA sanctions being issued a month is 63,300 - down from over 75,500 a month in 2013.
The department says it makes clear to jobseekers the conditions of receiving their benefits.
"If they fail to meet those conditions it's only fair that there should be consequences," a spokesman for the department told the BBC.
Nine out of 10 YMCAs are now referring those they support, like Matt, to food banks.
The charity says 79% of the referrals of young people were "as a direct result of delays in receiving benefit payments and punitive sanctions".

Mark grew up in care and says he has only lived with his mum for five years of his life

Those statistics will come as no surprise to those in the hostel in Burton.
Mark was left penniless and moved in to the YMCA after he lost his job fitting Toyota car seats at the town's automotive factory.
He was sanctioned for not "actively seeking work" - although his support worker says he did everything the DWP asked of him - and is now waiting for average temperatures to drop to freezing or below for seven days, at which point he will qualify for a cold weather payment of £25 a week.