Record 9.3 million UK food bank users

A total of 9.3 million people in the UK, including 3 million children, currently experience such high levels of poverty and hunger that they rely on charity food.

The research, commissioned by charity Trussell, the UK’s largest network of food banks, warns that without a dramatic shift away from the austerity policies of successive governments since 2009, a further 425,000 people, including 170,000 children, will experience extreme health conditions. hunger and deprivation. 2027.

Footprints at a community food bank in the north of England receiving donations (Photo: Twitter/Footprints UK)

Trussell, formerly the Trussel Trust, runs more than 1,400 food banks across the UK and distributed 3.1 million food parcels last year. The charity was founded in 1997 initially to feed children in Bulgaria, but opened its first food bank in Wiltshire, England, a quarter of a century ago as the country’s hunger crisis unfolded.

Trussell’s interim report, The Cost of Hunger and Deprivation, is based on an analysis of government data and its final report on emergency food needs in the UK, due to be published in spring 2025.

A report predicts the new Labor government will fail to deliver on its election promise to end the “moral scar” of food banks unless it raises incomes for the poorest families.

That’s around one in seven people in the UK struggling with deep and extreme poverty, what Trussell calls “hunger and deprivation”. The term was created by the charity to refer to the nearly 9.5 million people whose low household income and extreme financial vulnerability leave them most likely to rely on, or at risk of needing, food banks.

Those who typically suffer from “hunger and deprivation,” Trussell explains, have low incomes, have little or no savings, and may also have huge financial debts, including money owed to the government. Typically, these households are struggling and often cannot make ends meet. They cannot afford enough food, pay energy bills, or afford basic things like new clothes and shoes. A single unexpected financial crisis, such as a job loss, a large bill, or a stove or freezer replacement, can throw tight budgets into crisis and lead to dependence on food banks.

The new terminology, which includes “absolute poverty”, was developed by Trussell, partly to hold the Labor government to account for its election manifesto promising to “end mass dependence on emergency food parcels”.

However, those suffering from “hunger and deprivation” form a growing part of a larger group of nearly 14.5 million people experiencing relative poverty. They say that the family is in relative poverty, i.e. relative to the prevailing standard of living in the community if her income is below the poverty line of 60 percent of median income. Those facing “hunger and deprivation” are typically more than 25 percent below the poverty line.

Mass poverty in Britain today is increasingly becoming absolute rather than relative, and it is not a matter of falling behind the prevailing standard of living, but of a lack of the basic necessities to support human life. Hence their dependence on food banks to maintain their caloric intake. Many of these same working-class families live in substandard housing in the poorest areas with the poorest public services.

One in five children in the UK are classified as “hunger and deprivation”, including one in four children in the first four years of life. More than half of the people suffering from “hunger and deprivation” (about 5 million) come from households where one or more adults are disabled. A third of large families with three or more children were also at high risk of dependence on food banks, particularly due to the two-child benefit cap pioneered by the Tories and supported by Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Trussell argues that cuts to welfare benefits by successive governments over the decades have seriously damaged the “social safety net” that the welfare state was supposed to provide. Recent decades, especially since the reduction of austerity measures following the 2008 global economic crisis, have seen a rapid increase in the use of food banks. The growth is driven by low wages that keep families above the poverty line, and by the falling costs of already paltry benefit levels, including grossly inadequate benefits for the disabled and pensioners. Trussell estimates that almost four in 10 people receiving Universal Credit (UC), the main benefit, face hunger and deprivation.

There were 6.4 million people in UC in England, Scotland and Wales in January, according to official government statistics. Showing the prevalence of low pay in the UK, almost 40 per cent of applicants have a job.

The Trussell study found that 1 million more people suffer from “hunger and deprivation” than five years ago, and almost 3 million more than in the mid-2000s, when the Trussell Trust began providing food parcels.

To mark the release of Trussell’s findings, chief executive Emma Revie said: “It’s 2024 and we are facing historically high levels of demand for food banks. We as a society cannot allow this to continue. We must not allow food banks to become the new normal.”

Although Revie’s opinion is well-intentioned, the reality has already surpassed such wishes: food banks are a deeply ingrained feature of working-class life because acute mass poverty has been normalized by governments for decades.

Trussell is calling for the two-child benefit cap to be scrapped to help reduce child poverty in large families. Removing the two-child benefit cap would reduce the number of people suffering from hunger and deprivation by 9 percent, or 825,000 people.

But the charity says the move will not meet the needs of the majority of people at high risk of “hunger and deprivation”, including many disabled people and their unpaid carers. “We know that lifting the two-child limit would be a positive step for large families… but as this research shows, most people facing hunger and deprivation would not benefit from this one change,” Helen Barnard said. , Trussell’s policy director.

The report said: “Removing the family benefit cap and the two-child cap combined would lift 620,000 children out of absolute poverty, compared with 540,000 if the two-child cap were removed alone.”

Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has no plans to scrap the Tories’ two-child benefit cap. The Treasury argues that the relatively paltry £3 billion spent on lifting the cap is unaffordable given other investment needs. Meanwhile, the government has pledged to spend 2.5 percent of GDP on military spending as soon as conditions allow, with Reeves making a high-profile trip ahead of next week’s Budget to visit Ukrainian troops undergoing training in Britain.

Trussell’s other calls are for the government to support the incomes of the 2.2 million people whose universal credit income is being eroded by monthly deductions for historic loans and debts..

This, argues Trussell, could be achieved by introducing a legal minimum income level for the standard Universal Credit discount, capping the amount the government claims each month back from claimants’ payments. Another recommendation concerns increasing housing benefit rates in line with rising rents and protecting disability benefits.

In response to Trussell’s findings, the government spokesman could only reply piously: “No child should live in poverty” – which makes no sense, because children cannot be lifted out of poverty without a significant increase in the incomes of their parents or guardians, which will not happen in the “best case”. business government in history”.

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto promised to “end mass dependence on emergency food parcels”, adding that they have no place in a “fair and compassionate society”. But Starmer reiterated his Thatcherite beliefs that “handouts from the state do not promote the same sense of self-sufficiency as a fair wage” – a policy that will see up to £3 billion of welfare cuts in the budget.

According to the Labor Party mantra, work will set you free, but workers are not getting a “fair wage”. Trussell’s research showed that nearly two-thirds of those who experienced hunger and deprivation were members of households where at least one adult had paid work.

Trussell’s figures show that more than two thirds, 68 per cent, of working households receiving Universal Credit have been left without essential items such as basic toiletries and prescriptions in the last six months – only slightly lower than the rate among people receiving Universal Credit , but not in paid work 79 percent.