Downing Street’s failure to tackle child poverty and reduce food bank use is helping to drive public discontent with falling living standards and fuelling a desire for political alternatives, the UK’s biggest charity food provider has warned.
Trussell said one in six UK households went hungry last year and, without ambitious policies to tackle deepening poverty, Britain faces the prospect of locking in a “new normal” of increasingly severe hardship across society.
Having a job was no longer a defence against hunger, it said, and people in low-paid or precarious work such as carers and bus drivers were among those at risk of food insecurity – meaning they regularly could not afford to eat or had to skip meals.
Three in 10 people referred to food banks in 2024 were from working households, Trussell said, up from 24% in 2022. “Increasingly, work is not providing reliable protection from, or a route out of, severe hardship,” it said.
The party’s July 2024 general election manifesto promised to build on the work of past Labour governments to reduce child poverty, transform life chances and “end mass dependence of food parcels,” which it described as a “moral scar on our society”.
Trussell, which has 1,400 food bank outlets across the UK, said it was “increasingly clear” the government could not fulfil these manifesto promises unless it urgently tackled the “disturbingly high level” of severe hardship in many communities.
It said the government had yet to produce a “clear and fit for purpose” plan to tackle entrenched hunger and hardship, and called for “more determined action” from ministers to meet the public’s desire for “visible signs” of improving living standards.
“The worrying signs of the deepening of hardship, and normalisation of basic needs going unmet, speak to the wider public discontent with living standards in our communities, and the desire for change,” it said.
Trussell’s biennial Hunger in the UK report, published on Wednesday, estimates over 14 million people were food insecure last year, including 3.8 million children. This compares with 11.6 million people in 2022. Families in deprived areas were three times as likely to go hungry as those in well-off neighbourhoods.
The report calls for the two-child limit on benefit to be scrapped, arguing that this would lift 670,000 people, including 470,000 children, out of poverty. The two-child limit denies £3,500 a year in social security support to third and subsequent children born to families claiming universal credit.
“Parents are telling us they are losing sleep, worrying about how they will pay for new shoes, school trips, keep the lights on, or afford the bus fare to work. We have already created a generation of children who’ve never known life without food banks. That must change,” said Helen Barnard, Trussell’s director of policy.
The government, which is preparing to publish a child poverty reduction strategy this autumn, has resisted scrapping the two-child limit on cost grounds – estimated at £3bn a year. The latest figures show 1.7 million children live in households affected by the policy.
Trussell research has found that families with three or more children account for much of the growth in severe hardship over the past decade, with a sharp rise after the introduction of the two-child limit in 2017.
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It welcomed the government’s plans to build more social housing and enshrine stronger employment rights, but said these could only go “so far” in tackling immediate needs.
“The reality is there has been little recent progress on the use of food banks … There is a real risk that, without any significant shift, we are facing a new normal of extraordinarily high levels of severe hardship in our communities,” it said.
It said the upcoming child poverty strategy and the autumn budget in November were opportunities for the government to reset its plans to tackle poverty and raise living standards.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “The government is determined to tackle the unacceptable rise in food bank dependence.
“In addition to extending free school meals and ensuring the poorest children don’t go hungry in the holidays with £1bn to reform crisis support, our child poverty taskforce will publish an ambitious strategy later this year.
“We are also overhauling jobcentres and reforming the broken welfare system to support people into good, secure jobs, while always protecting those who need it most.”
