Food banks ought to be shocking in a country as rich as the UK, and a decade ago they were. In 2012, when the Guardian launched a Breadline Britain series, the idea of hunger as a widespread social problem was an unfamiliar one. Then, this newspaper sought to challenge the narrative being promoted by David Cameron’s government that jobs offered a sure route out of poverty. In fact, research showed that 3.6m households with at least one adult in work were just “one small push from penury”.
It is a grim indictment of the policies pursued over the past 10 years that the food banks opened under austerity have not gone away, but multiplied. Currently, the UK has more than 2,500 of them. Low pay, low benefit levels and a lack of affordable housing have made it impossible for millions of people to do anything other than live hand-to-mouth. Reports of adults skipping meals, and pupils turning up at school hungry, are frequent. Now, due to a cost of living crisis made far worse by Tory incompetence, the situation has grown graver still. Nearly one in five low-income families experienced food insecurity in September, new data from the Food Foundation shows. Nearly 10 million adults and 4 million children, including around half of all universal credit claimants, didn’t have enough to eat or skipped meals.
