In December 2016, they provided 146,798 three-day emergency food supplies to people in crisis; 61,093 of these went to children.

But a 13% increase in average foodbank use in the first six months of this financial year since April suggests an increased demand when it comes to Christmas.

Premier spoke to Alison Inglif-Jones, trustee of The Trussel Trust, who explained: “In December there are multiple pressures hitting families – the cold weather, the high energy bills and that’s of course particularly for people on pre-payment metres.”

She added that there is also pressure on foodbanks from others: “People who come to a Trussel Trust foodbank need to be referred by a social worker, school governor or MP – so they also want people to be fed before Christmas.

There has been a 30% increase in need for foodbanks in places where universal credit has rolled out, according to The Trussel Trust.

Inglif-Jones revealed some of the contributing factors: “Benefit sanctions and delays, increasingly low incomes and of course universal credit, financial pressures are on. We usually find people are just about getting on and then something happens.”

A witness, who cannot be named, said he heard the boy being beaten and then never saw him again.

He recently found out in a newspaper report the boy, who was aged under 10, had died.

The witness also said he was physically and sexually abused while in care and believed he had killed his mother after being told so by a nun, not finding out this was untrue until his mid-20s.

He was speaking at the latest phase of hearings at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in Edinburgh, which is now taking evidence about institutions run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, which have issued an apology to anyone abused in their care.

The witness said he was taken to the Smyllum Park Orphanage in Lanark, South Lanarkshire, aged three in 1952.

He said he heard a boy being beaten “quite badly” behind closed curtains.

“We heard slap, slap, slap, and ‘shut up’, ‘shut up’. It was one of the nuns,” he said.

“The next day [the boy] didn’t show up. We all cheered because we thought he had got a family and he was away.

“It wasn’t until I saw the paper, the Sunday Post, that I found out he died, or he was killed.”

A BBC and Sunday Post investigation earlier this year found that at least 400 children from Smyllum Park are thought to be buried in an unmarked grave at the town’s St Mary’s Cemetery.

The orphanage was home to more than 10,000 children between opening in 1864 and closing in 1981.

Prosecutors have said there is no evidence a crime has been committed at the orphanage…

The report, titled “Enough is Enough: Addressing the Root Causes of Radicalisation” said that most people deemed to have been radicalised into Islamist extremism only show a skin-deep commitment to the religion and its practices.

Instead the report concludes that radicalisation, which exists in many other forms outside of Islamist extremism, including gang membership, gun and knife culture, political extremism and aggressive forms of racism, has its roots in a variety of common causes.

It identifies five common drivers:

• Ideology
• Identity
• Deprivation  and economic marginalisation
• Mental health
• Family breakdown.

Ian Sansbury, author of the report, told Premier there is an element of ideology in Islamic radicalisation, but the government should stop making it the focus of its Prevent Strategy.

He said: “We’ve drawn on research from the UN and MI5 that shows that even within Islamic radicalisation significant number of young extremists really only have a superficial commitment to their faith.

“The current focus on religion and ideology puts too many young people at risk.”

Oasis Foundation said a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly and many engage in behaviours such as drug taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes – practices forbidden by their religion.

The report also cited a UN study of the processes of radicalisation within Africa that discovered that 57 per cent of respondents who had…