In the past couple of years this country has seen unprecedented numbers of people forced to turn to food banks for help as the cost of living escalates and families find it impossible to make ends meet.

At this festive period when many of us will be eating and drinking to excess, it is an unpalatable truth that there really are far more people actually living on the breadline than our modern society should be accepting of.

While the root causes of such borderline poverty will need a major effort to tackle, there are those who are working on the front-line to ensure that people without resources do not starve.

Those who run soup kitchens such as the one operated by the Intouch Foundation, featured in today’s Telegraph & Argus, provide a vital service for those who have fallen yet further through society’s cracks and find themselves homeless and living on the streets.

The plight of these people is brought into ever sharper relief at Christmas time, and we must all be thankful for the selfless hard work and devotion of the many charitable and voluntary groups who make it their business to help.

These groups are treating the symptoms of the problem, and more power to their collective elbows. The causes must be tackled by politicians, the authorities and all of us who make up our modern Britain.

We may never see an end to starvation, poverty and need, but we can perhaps take a leaf from the books of those who try their hardest to help, and perhaps one Christmas in the future everyone will have enough to eat without having to take handouts.