No child should go to bed hungry in the UK. We are the fifth richest country in the world, we export £22 billion in food and drink overseas and we have never known more about how to farm and transport food.
It’s a scandal that one in five children lives in a family that worries about putting food on the table.
I have recently started giving out food collected by a local charity, The Real Junk Food Project, to families at schools at pick-up time. The food is often near or on its sell-by date, but perfectly edible, and this is a great way to ensure that food doesn’t end up in the bin. Grateful parents stop to tell me how difficult feeding their family has become, or the shame they feel in relying on food banks to get by. I have come to realise how fragile food security is as parents look for ways to make it through the weekend without their children going hungry.
In August last year, the Environmental Audit Committee set out to examine the state of hunger in the UK. We wanted to understand the scale of the problem, to get a sense of whether the parents I meet in Wakefield are the exception or the norm, and what the government is doing to tackle hunger.
What we found shocked us.
The UK is one of the worst countries in Europe at tackling hunger and malnutrition. More than 2.2 million people in the UK have little or no certainty on a daily basis whether they will eat. One in five of all severely food-insecure people in Europe live in this country. Women on low incomes or struggling to find work and their children are amongst the most vulnerable. There is no minister for hunger and no food plan to set out what we need to do to tackle the issue.
Across the country, the need for food banks continues to rise. In 2017-18 food banks delivered emergency food supplies to 1.3 million people in the UK. Half a million of whom were children, in crisis, reliant on emergency food supplies to keep the wolf from the door.
The scourge of child hunger
The cause? Rising debts, reductions to benefits through universal credit, and low pay. Public sector pay has stagnated and in the private sector job security is a thing of the past, with parents working multiple jobs with no guarantee of regular shifts. Having less in the bank at the end of the month means hard decisions have to be made. Rising rent, electricity and water bills or travel costs, mean the food budget gets squeezed. Too often, parents are forced to skip meals to make sure their kids eat.
Universal credit has made things worse. We heard that fluctuating and delayed benefits have driven parents to food banks, just to get some milk in the fridge and bread in the cupboard. A year after the roll-out of universal credit, food banks saw a 52 per cent increase in demand - a fact that Amber Rudd, the secretary of state for work and pensions, has finally had to accept. With our benefits system driving people to emergency food banks, it is clear something is very wrong.
The harmful effects of children not getting enough healthy food are well known. Stunted growth, overweight and obesity can set off a lifetime of health conditions from heart disease to type 2 diabetes, and cancer. Parents are forced to rely on the cheapest foods to stretch their budget, which means calorie-rich but nutrient-poor processed food. Hunger and poor nutrition in children affect attention and concentration, and have been associated with lower academic achievement. Skipping breakfast has been linked to decreased alertness, memory and problem-solving. Hungry children find it more difficult to learn, and are harder to teach.
As families struggle, schools are increasingly having to fill the gap. On top of teaching bigger classes with fewer teachers, schools are acting as food banks, clothes banks and even providing emergency loans. Our schools have never been so essential to family support, offering a crutch to parents and children where local council services are cut and incomes stretched. Many families rely on schools as the best chance for a healthy, hot meal for their children. When holidays come around, rather than looking forward to time off, parents are filled with anxiety and fear of “holiday hunger”.
When I visited Mackie Hill school in Wakefield, the headteacher told me how she had to personally go and pick up several children from home, get them dressed and give them breakfast at school as their parents were incapacitated. At Mackie Hill, free fruit is available for every year group, not just infants, and second and third helpings of school lunches are encouraged.
How has the government responded to this crisis? In the autumn 2018 Budget, the chancellor offered a £400 million “bonus” - £10,000 per primary and £50,000 per secondary - to help schools buy ”the little extras they need”. That is £20 million less than he gave councils to fix potholes. With teachers’ salaries having decreased by more than £4,000 over the past 10 years, this bonus is an insult.
Brexit will make things worse. A third of our food comes from Europe, including the majority of our fresh fruit and vegetables. No-deal Brexit poses great challenges to our already broken food system. Supermarkets, hospitals and schools are already stockpiling food. Guidance published last month from the Department for Education suggested schools have “significant flexibilities” with food standards in the event of supply chain issues. This is code for going back to the bad old days of chicken nuggets and turkey twizzlers, scrapping what was achieved in the Children’s Food Bill I led in 2005.
We need the government to appoint a minister for hunger, to work across government and set out a roadmap to ensure that no child goes hungry in the UK. The government sees hunger as an overseas issue, with the Department for International Development the only department to include it in its plans. Action is needed here at home, including from the Department for Education, and UK-wide measures for hunger should be in place to monitor hunger and track progress. Government needs to recognise that cutting local services, allowing the quality and certainty of jobs to decline, failing to invest in areas outside London and underfunding schools all play a role.
In 21st-century Britain, a child going to school hungry and parents relying on the canteen to provide their child’s only hot meal of the day is unacceptable. The government has allowed these issues to fall between the cracks. Tackle this and we have happier, healthier and better-educated children, parents and teachers. Get it wrong and the consequences last a lifetime. We must end the scourge of hunger.
Mary Creagh, Labour MP for Wakefield, is the chair of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee
