Faces BabyBank Bedford demand has almost doubled in two years, with the Bedford charity now supporting 2,098 families in 2025, up from roughly 1,100 when it opened in January 2023, and chief executive Michaela Martindale says the community’s generosity is no longer keeping pace with need.
From emergency referral to repeat visits
The trajectory tells its own story. Families served rose modestly from 1,100 to around 1,200 between 2023 and 2024, then surged by roughly 75% in a single year. Martindale says the character of demand has shifted too, not just its scale.
‘Every week we meet parents who are making impossible choices between paying the rent, heating their home or buying the essentials their baby needs,’ she said. ‘The cost-of-living crisis hasn’t gone away, it has simply changed, and families are living with its effects for much longer.’
Crucially, the charity is no longer just catching people in a single moment of crisis. ‘We’re supporting more families than ever before, and we’re increasingly seeing repeat referrals because people simply aren’t recovering financially,’ Martindale said. Many are returning several times rather than requiring one emergency referral, a shift that puts sustained pressure on stock and volunteer capacity alike.
Housing compounds the problem. ‘Many families are living in temporary accommodation or overcrowded homes where there isn’t even room for a cot or pushchair,’ Martindale said. The charity distributes cots, Moses baskets, prams and highchairs alongside clothing and consumables, meaning a single referral can involve bulky, hard-to-source goods.
In 2025, FACES Bedford handed out 36,400 items of children’s clothing, 54,080 nappies, 536 tubs of formula milk, 298 newborn starter packs and 3,768 books and toys, with bedding, baby baths and other essentials on top of that.
Faces BabyBank Bedford demand in a wider national picture
Bedford’s experience reflects a national trend. According to a survey of 225 baby banks conducted by the Baby Bank Alliance in March 2026, the sector supported 210,000 families and 400,000 children across the UK in 2025, distributing more than 19 million essential items in the process.
That 400,000-children figure represents an 11% increase on the prior year, according to The Guardian, citing Baby Bank Alliance research published in June 2026. Demand is rising faster than the voluntary sector’s capacity to meet it, and Bedford is not an outlier.
The charity’s own finances show the strain of scaling up. Charity Commission filings for FACES Bedford show total gross income rising from £289,140 to £413,120 in its latest reported period, while total expenditure moved from £314,060 to £319,710. Income growth has, for now, outrun spending growth, but the charity remains reliant on donated goods and financial contributions to cover gaps when stock runs short.
Registered under charity number 1108574, FACES Bedford works with families with children up to the age of 19, though the BabyBank arm focuses on essentials for children under seven and is run largely by volunteers.
Martindale is clear about what is driving the numbers. ‘More parents in work are still unable to afford essential items because wages are not keeping pace with household costs,’ the charity said. The working poor, not just the unemployed, are now a core part of the referral base.
The Bedford community, Martindale says, ‘continues to be incredibly generous, but demand is growing faster than donations.’ For a charity built on goodwill and good-quality cast-offs, that gap is the central challenge of 2025 and beyond. Whether the income figures in the next set of Charity Commission filings still look as comfortable will be the real test of whether generosity can be made to scale.
