Gordon Brown says companies should collaborate with charities to respond to poverty this winter while surplus food is redistributed to help hungry families (The government has lost control of the cost of living crisis – here’s how businesses must step in, 16 November). Food banks are clear: a charitable response to poverty isn’t working. The latest data from the Department for Work and Pensions indicates that 86% of households reporting severe food insecurity didn’t access a food bank. A food parcel cannot stop hunger from happening in the first place. While food banks have scrambled to help as many people as possible, destitution figures have more than doubled in five years.
Food banks in Canada and the US show us that decades of channelling surplus resources to food banks cannot ever fix the problem. The long-term impact on people’s physical and mental health of going hungry, eating too little or having to eat poor-quality surplus food will be devastating.
Yet down the road from food banks, food sits on the shelves of local shops. It’s safely stored, clearly labelled and ready to be purchased. How much time, effort and fuel could be saved if people had enough money to go to a shop and buy food for themselves? How much stress, shame and poor health could be prevented?
People need secure work that pays a real living wage – this is how companies can play their part. Certainly, universal credit must be reviewed and social security payments brought in line with the cost of living. But it’s also vital to extend the household support fund and ensure crisis support in cash. Increasing incomes and preventing hardship must come first.
Sabine Goodwin and Maria Marshall
Independent Food Aid Network
• “It makes me feel like a failure” – so said a parent recently about not being able to afford their child’s school food. As Gordon Brown echoed in his article, this represents the stark reality for families.
At Chefs in Schools, we come face to face with child hunger every day. That is why we’ve been calling for a change to the entitlement threshold for free school meals since the charity’s inception in 2018. When our co-founder Henry Dimbleby wrote the School Food Plan in 2013, nearly 700,000 children who lived just beyond the £7,400 income threshold were struggling daily with hunger and its devastating knock-on effects. Henry called for reform then, and again in the national food strategy in 2020. Successive governments have failed to act and the situation is worse than ever.
Many families who were “just about managing” no longer are. New research we commissioned found that 41% of parents are being forced to pack less nutritious lunches due to soaring food prices. More than half of parents said they struggle to make ends meet, and 30% said they’d had to stop paying for hot school food for their child.
Today, almost 1 million children living in poverty in England are denied free school meals. Beyond the clear moral case for action, the benefits of investing in child health are clear – for every £1 invested in access to school food, the country sees £1.38 returned in economic benefit. This week, Jeremy Hunt will deliver his autumn statement. Will the government once again fail to see the power of school food and act?
Naomi Duncan
CEO, Chefs in Schools
• Gordon Brown has his views on curing poverty, but surely we won’t get anywhere unless more money is available to spend on our infrastructure, services and local authorities. Not everybody wants tax cuts; we just want a fairer way of sorting out who pays how much of their income to raise this money. As someone in his mid-80s with a decent pension, I could afford to pay more tax, but only if those who have a larger income than me are also paying more. No more £2m bonuses and no more earning a hundred times more than someone on universal credit is able to get each week.
Ron Brewer
Old Buckenham, Norfolk
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