Volunteer Sue is on hand to greet everyone as they arrive at St Matthew's Church, just off the busy Wandsworth Bridge Road, South Fulham. They receive a cheery welcome, a hot cuppa and something to eat as they wait to pick up their emergency food parcels. Sue is on first-name terms with the regulars and fusses over the young mums. “Does baby want milk? I can warm some up. I’ll get some toast,” she says.

It's less than two weeks to Christmas (12 December 2018) and so, if you have a voucher, you can pick up a Christmas present for the kids. In December 2017 Britain's largest foodbank provider, the Trussell Trust, provided 159,388 three-day emergency food supplies, a 49% increase on the monthly average.

This Christmas will be their busiest to date. The charity blames that on benefit cuts and the unfolding chaos of Universal Credit. Shortly before our visit to Hammersmith and Fulham Foodbank, the government announced its plans for the next stage of the Coalition government's flagship welfare reform unveiled in 2010 by the then work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith: ‘managed migration’. Until now, only people making a new application have gone onto the controversial new benefit system. The idea is that claimants under the old system will move en masse onto the benefit, and so people currently claiming up to six benefits will move onto single monthly payments.

The advice sector is bracing itself. According to the Trussell Trust, in 2018 there was a 52% average increase in foodbank use in areas that have had Universal Credit for at least 12 months, as compared to 13% in those that have not.

In the six months up to the end of November 2018, Hammersmith and Fulham Foodbank, which opens six times a week in three different locations and is supported by the Trussell Trust, fed 7,342 people, as compared to 6,376 in 2017 and 3,317 in 2016 over the same six-month period.

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As you walk into St Matthews there is a series of large, white plastic tubs full of fresh fruit and veg, including bananas, melons and pineapples – if you have a voucher, you help yourself. At first glance, you wouldn't know it was a church hall.