The latest data on the number of UK families going hungry provides an alarming glimpse of the grim struggle faced by millions of people in their day-to-day lives. According to the Food Foundation tracker, one in five households with children have gone without meals in recent weeks, with 11 million people overall experiencing food insecurity – although this marks a small improvement since last summer. The finding that the amount of vegetables bought has fallen to a 50-year low is particularly dismaying, given all that we know about their role in promoting good health. Along with homelessness and inadequate housing, this is the rawest of all lacks. People are going without the basic necessities of life.
The foundation says that the price of a weekly basket of food has increased by around 25% in two years. While income inequality overall remains stable, the gulf dividing haves from have-nots becomes harder to justify when the difficulties afflicting the poorest households are so acute. The recent removal of the cost of living support payments that were paid on top of universal credit can only exacerbate a situation that is already causing unnecessary pain.
Inadequate incomes are the cause, along with high prices and policies such as the two-child limit that restrict benefit payments to certain families. As this column has argued before, and as a coalition of charities and thinktanks recently stressed in discussions with Labour, the basic level of benefits needs to rise. The Food Foundation says that 45% of households in receipt of universal credit have experienced food insecurity. Its latest bulletin highlights two specific policy levers that could be pulled to direct help at children who need it.
One is the £900m household support fund introduced in 2021, during the pandemic. So far, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has refused to commit to including this item in his upcoming budget. The fund is widely used by councils to provide holiday food vouchers for children on free school meals (the fund is for England only as some anti-poverty policy is devolved). The second measure concerns the free school meal criteria themselves, which the foundation says should be widened so that all children from universal credit households are automatically enrolled. It views this as a stepping stone on the way to a policy in which all children receive free meals at school.
What makes the possible removal of the household support fund particularly alarming is that cash-strapped councils are also cutting their own locally funded hardship payments, due to the crisis engulfing their finances. Charities including the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank network, know that they cannot take the place of state support. Meanwhile, health experts have become increasingly vocal about the harmful consequences of poor housing and nutrition for public health. The number of people admitted to hospital each year with nutritional deficiencies has trebled in a decade to more than 800,000.
Recent weeks have seen announcements from the government on restricting tobacco, vaping and gambling. But food looms larger than any of these in public policy, because every single person needs it. A healthy diet is a precondition for other forms of thriving; undernourishment, particularly that of children, is shaming and alarming. A government that lets so many people go hungry has failed the most fundamental test.
