Apply for a Food Voucher
Food Vouchers are provided for use at ASDA, Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi, Farmfoods, Iceland or Sainsburys.
Food vouchers awards are allocated at standard award amounts of:
- 1 £60 for a single person household
- 1 £100 for a household of 2 to 5 people
- 1 £150 for a household of 6 people or more
Households can receive a maximum of 1 standard food award and a maximum of 1 standard fuel award from the scheme from Monday 1 April 2024 to Monday 31 March 2025.
This is in addition to vouchers received in previous years.
Applications for food and fuel vouchers are treated separately.
Find out more about:
Eligibility for the Food Voucher Scheme
Households must meet the scheme eligibility criteria.
You'll need to confirm these before your application can be processed:
- applicant’s name
- applicant’s address
- applicant’s income
- number of people in the household
The service must confirm that they have seen documentary evidence from the applicant, such as:
- bank statement
- council tax bill
- payslip
- Department for Work and Pensions benefit notification
- driving licence
- passport
- utility bill
In addition:
- the application is for a household resident within City of York boundaries; and
- the household is seeking advice and support from the partner service due to food poverty or other financial hardship and the household is unable to meet their current household need for food; and
- the household has dependent children or they are a vulnerable household
A vulnerable household may include, but is not restricted to:
- a person who has a physical or sensory impairment, learning disability or mental health problem and who may be unable to protect themselves from harm or abuse, or their carer.
- elderly, frail or confused older people
- people who are seriously ill or have a severe long time health condition
- people who are recently bereaved
- pregnant women or those who have recently given birth
- those who have obvious difficulty in understanding, speaking or reading English
- care leaver
- those fleeing domestic abuse
- anyone suffering severe hardship
Apply for the Food Voucher Scheme
Applications for Food Vouchers are made through advice and support services in York.
Applications can only be considered is part of an overall financial capability advice or support assessment, by phone or face to face, including as appropriate benefits checks and other information about reducing out goings, for example, social tariffs for broadband or energy efficiency measures.
Please note: advice and support agencies need to be a registered partner with the scheme to be able to distribute fuel or fuel vouchers.
Registered partner services carry out the assessment. Successful applications are processed via the Charis online platform.
A record of the application, confirmation of the applicant’s circumstances, eligibility and reasons for the award must be kept by the registered partner service.
Approved Fuel and Food Vouchers are sent electronically to the resident by SMS text or email. Contained within the email or SMS is a link to the unique voucher code as well as all the redemption instructions. Vouchers should be used within 2 weeks.