The UK's food poverty crisis

A record 3.1 million emergency food parcels have been handed out by a leading UK charity's food banks in just a year, according to latest figures.

Of the food parcels distributed by the Trussell Trust's network of 1,300 food banks in the 12 months until March, more than a million went to children. The total number is "nearly double that of five years ago", said Sky News. 

How bad is Britain's food crisis?

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, the government's cost-of-living support package prevented 1.3 million people falling into poverty in 2022-23. But Alison McGovern, Labour's acting shadow work and pensions secretary, said the "dreadful" emergency good parcel figures "lay bare the reality facing households across the country after 14 years of Tory misery".

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Trussell Trust boss Emma Revie warned that the UK is facing "historically high levels of food bank need". Official food bank use is only part of the picture, with food pantries and other community initiatives on the rise nationwide.

The UK's food poverty level is now among the highest in Europe. Roughly 15% of UK households were experiencing food insecurity in January, according to the Food Foundation. That's equivalent to eight million adults and three million children going hungry or skipping meals because they cannot regularly afford to buy groceries. 

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported last year that "exceptionally high food inflation", combined with "inadequate support from Universal Credit", has created a "horrendous new normal", where those on the lowest incomes are being "forced into making impossible choices about how often they eat". 

Experts have warned that high levels of food insecurity among low-income families constitute a "health emergency", driving the recorded rise in hospital admissions for conditions linked to poor nutrition, such as malnutrition and rickets.

Last week MPs heard that schoolchildren were pretending to eat out of empty lunch boxes and eating rubbers, because they do not qualify for free school meals. 

A third of school-age children living in poverty are thought to be falling short of the government-set threshold, according Child Poverty Action Group.

What has caused this? 

There are a number of factors involved including austerity, compounded by Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis.

In 2019, about 2.2 million people in Britain were "severely food insecure", according to a public health nutrition report in World Nutrition. A decade of government austerity policies after the financial crash of 2008 resulted in "significant reductions in social sector expenditure", leading to the highest reported level of food insecurity in Europe. 

Public health nutrition was reduced to all but essential services and most vulnerable groups, the report found.

But after Covid-19 emerged "on the back of Brexit" in 2020, the UK saw "dramatic and cumulative increases in food poverty and the inability of many to afford adequate food to meet their basic nutritional requirements", Lynne Kennedy, food poverty expert and study co-author, told The Independent in 2022.

By May 2020, job losses and the impact of the pandemic had sent numbers of severely food insecure people rocketing to more than 5 million. 

And the impact of Brexit since then has only compounded the problem. Last year, economists at LSE's independent Centre for Economic Performance concluded that, thanks to border and regulatory checks, Brexit was responsible for about a third of UK food price inflation since 2019.

What can be done?

Some 85 charities and civil society organisations are calling on Rishi Sunak to reverse what they call the "deeply disappointing" decision to postpone a UK visit by the UN inspector on food poverty until after the next general election. 

"We believe now is an opportune time for a country visit by the UN special rapporteur on the right to food," said the open letter, coordinated by the charity Just Fair.