\n<\/p>\n
Downing Street\u2019s 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\u2019s biggest charity food provider has warned.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cnew normal\u201d of increasingly severe hardship across society.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 meaning they regularly could not afford to eat or had to skip meals.<\/p>\n
Three in 10 people referred to food banks in 2024 were from working households, Trussell said, up from 24% in 2022. \u201cIncreasingly, work is not providing reliable protection from, or a route out of, severe hardship,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
The party\u2019s July 2024 general election manifesto promised to build on the work of past Labour governments to reduce child poverty, transform life chances and \u201cend mass dependence of food parcels,\u201d which it described as a \u201cmoral scar on our society\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trussell, which has 1,400 food bank outlets across the UK, said it was \u201cincreasingly clear\u201d the government could not fulfil these manifesto promises unless it urgently tackled the \u201cdisturbingly high level\u201d of severe hardship in many communities.<\/p>\n
It said the government had yet to produce a \u201cclear and fit for purpose\u201d plan to tackle entrenched hunger and hardship, and called for \u201cmore determined action\u201d from ministers to meet the public\u2019s desire for \u201cvisible signs\u201d of improving living standards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
Trussell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a33,500 a year in social security support to third and subsequent children born to families claiming universal credit.<\/p>\n
\u201cParents 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\u2019ve never known life without food banks. That must change,\u201d said Helen Barnard, Trussell\u2019s director of policy.<\/p>\n
The government, which is preparing to publish a child poverty reduction strategy this autumn, has resisted scrapping the two-child limit on cost grounds \u2013 estimated at \u00a33bn a year. The latest figures show 1.7 million children live in households affected by the policy.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n It welcomed the government\u2019s plans to build more social housing and enshrine stronger employment rights, but said these could only go \u201cso far\u201d in tackling immediate needs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is there has been little recent progress on the use of food banks \u2026 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,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: \u201cThe government is determined to tackle the unacceptable rise in food bank dependence.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition to extending free school meals and ensuring the poorest children don\u2019t go hungry in the holidays with \u00a31bn to reform crisis support, our child poverty taskforce will publish an ambitious strategy later this year.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Downing Street\u2019s 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\u2019s biggest charity food provider has warned. Trussell said one in six UK households went hungry last year and, without ambitious policies to tackle deepening<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[10727,12449,10672,4875,1039,1725,2295,177,185],"class_list":{"0":"post-20232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-banks","9":"tag-dependence","10":"tag-discontent","11":"tag-driving","12":"tag-failure","13":"tag-food","14":"tag-poverty","15":"tag-public","16":"tag-tackle"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}