A PRIEST’S controversial advice to desperate and needy people to shoplift has prompted two women to launch a Facebook campaign targeting supermarkets.

Linda Maloney and Bev Barker are calling on stores to stop throwing away food which is past its sell-by date, and instead give it to destitute people.

Linda, who lives in Father Tim Jones’s Tang Hall parish, said: “If food is given away to the destitute at the eleventh hour, 11pm on the sell-by date, this is humanitarian, and is not illegal. Remember, this is the sell-by date, not the eat-by date.

“It is immoral to wait until midnight and then throw it away into a locked waste skip.”

She said she had been inspired by Mr Jones’s pre Christmas sermon, which had decried the plight of the hungry and homeless. The priest-in-charge of St Lawrence and St Hilda advised desperate and vulnerable people to shoplift, saying it was the “least worst option” for some people in desperate situations, such as prisoners emerging from jail who had no benefits.

The story, reported exclusively in The Press, went around the world.

Linda said today the campaign had 30 members, including friends and family members, and complete strangers.

Mr Jones, who has joined, said it was “incredibly humbling” that such a campaign should be launched on the back of his sermon, and said it was hard to argue against its demands.

Linda’s husband, Lee, said one of the worst cases of food waste he had come across was at a supermarket fish counter, where wolf fish and tope were used solely for display purposes. “I asked what was going to happen to them, only to be told they would be thrown away.

“I said: ‘Well, throw them to me,’ only to be told that ‘health and safety rules’ prevented that. So three perfectly edible (and delicious) fish went to waste."


What the retailers say...

RETAILERS said today it was a myth that supermarkets threw away large amounts of food – and said a “fair share” scheme already existed under which food approaching its sell-by date was given by supermarkets to charities.

The British Retail Consortium said stores tried their utmost to keep waste to a minimum, for example by discounting items nearing their sell-by date.

A spokesman said there were three restrictions relating to the selling of food:

• The sell-by date: primarily intended for store staff to indicate when food should be sold by, but not legally binding.

• The best before date: related to the quality of food and not safety – for example, the crunchiness of biscuits.

• The use-by date: related to safety – it could be potentially dangerous to eat something beyond this date.