More than 2m adults in UK cannot afford to eat every day, survey finds

Mon 9 May 2022 00.01 BST

One in seven adults estimated to be food-insecure, up 57% from January, owing to rising cost of living


Food banks say people are requesting food that does not need to be cooked or stored in a fridge or freezer. Photograph: Peter Summers/Getty Images

More than 2 million adults in the UK have gone without food for a whole day over the past month because they cannot afford to eat, according to a survey revealing the “catastrophic” impact of the cost of living crisis.

The latest survey of the nation’s food intake shows a 57% jump in the proportion of households cutting back on food or skipping meals over the first three months of this year, with one in seven adults (7.3 million) estimated to be food-insecure, up from 4.7 million in January.

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, described the findings as devastating, saying they exposed how families were being left in desperate hardship. “Boris Johnson is responsible for this crisis and has no solutions to fix it,” he said.

The survey came as one of Britain’s biggest energy suppliers called for urgent government action to help households cope with an anticipated £1,000 rise in bills this winter. The London fire brigade, meanwhile, was forced to issue an urgent safety warning against improvising fires at home, after a man set fire to his house by burning timber in his living room to keep warm.

The research by the Food Foundation thinktank found millions more people – including 2.6 million children – report they now have smaller meals than usual, regularly skip meals altogether or do not eat when they are hungry, as food insecurity returns to levels last seen at the start of the first national lockdown.

However, while many reported missing out on meals or eating irregularly during the first months of the pandemic because of food scarcity caused by panic buying and supply problems, the latest increase is put down to rising costs and poverty.

Food banks are reporting that energy costs are so prohibitive for some people they request that charity food parcels that contain no food that has to be cooked using a cooker or that needs to be stored in a fridge or freezer.

The rapid deterioration in food security reflects soaring energy, food and petrol prices coupled with below-inflation benefit rises. The Food Foundation said it was so shocked by its initial findings that it reran the survey on a wider basis, only to get the same results.

It predicted food insecurity figures were likely to get worse over the next few months as inflation continues to rise and the full impact of April’s national insurance rise hits family budgets along with the lifting of the energy price cap.

Anna Taylor, the foundation’s executive director, said: “The extremely rapid rise in food insecurity since January points to a catastrophic situation for families. Food insecurity puts families under extreme mental stress and forces people to survive on the cheapest calories, which lead to health problems.”

Prof Sir Michael Marmot, a public health expert at University College London, said: “If one household in seven is food insecure, society is failing in a fundamental way. These figures on food insecurity are all the more chilling because the problem is soluble, but far from being solved it is getting worse.”

There is little expectation that ministers will raise benefits or expand free school meals anytime soon, despite rising public concern over the cost of living. Last week, George Eustice, the environment, food and rural affairs secretary, urged consumers to switch to value brands to save on grocery spending in response to rising food prices.

“Bless him [Eustice], he’s actually aware there are cheaper brand foods in the world. The poor man, who has lived such a sheltered life he thought 10p off a tin of beans would solve the problem,” said Kathleen Kerridge, an office manager and food activist from Portsmouth.

On the food poverty frontline, charities are warning that demand for food is rising as budgets get tighter. Ellen-Scarlett Ryan, of Bassetlaw food bank in Worksop, said it supplied 24 households with food parcels on the day after Easter last month, way ahead of its previous record of 16.

Many of these clients had never before used food banks and were struggling with their newfound reliance on charity to feed their families, Ryan said. “We are finding people in floods of tears. They are so scared, they are at their wits’ end. It is such a difficult and emotional time.”

Households were making the food go further, she said, putting smaller portions on the table and bulking out dishes with lentils and rice. A growing number were asking for food that did not require cooking with the gas on, as they could not afford to put cash in the meter.

On Monday Keith Anderson, the chief executive of Scottish Power, said a fresh support package would be vital before a further dramatic increase in the cost of gas and electricity bills due in October.

A government spokesperson said: “We recognise the pressures on the cost of living and we are doing what we can to help, including spending £22bn across the next financial year to support people with energy bills and cut fuel duty.

“For the hardest hit, we’re putting an average of £1,000 more per year into the pockets of working families on universal credit, have also boosted the minimum wage by more than £1,000 a year for full-time workers and our household support fund is there to help with the cost of everyday essentials.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/09/more-than-2m-adults-in-uk-cannot-afford-to-eat-every-day-survey-finds

Lies

They still have food store to turn to.

Here in Nigeria, you are on your own.

They haven't seen anything yet.

That means nigeria may have upto 20 million hungry men with no food on the table.

Among them 1.9m Nigerians. you would feel for the uk the way Nigerians are migrating there
Besides statistics of Nigeria hungry is 250m against population of 200m. We all are hungry even Lebanese I’m the country ..

bennybuhari:
Lies

This video was shot last year.

LONGEST EVER Food Bank Queue � Over 2km Long

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geAXyIPxa_U

While in Nigeria the figure is closer to 150 million

IhateYouMan:
While in Nigeria the figure is closer to 150 million

We’ll, Nigerians are just plain stupid

And UK promised to supply Africa with Milk and Honey to last for 100 years

The working poor!

'I'm in work but I need to use a food bank'

27 April


Caroline and her daughter face a choice between heating and eating

"I'm trapped," says Caroline, one of the tens of thousands of people in work who have to use food banks in the UK.

The classroom assistant and single mother describes it as a "circle I can't get out of".

Over the past year, millions of food parcels have been distributed to people like Caroline, the Trussell Trust says.

The charity, which runs more than half of UK food banks, says it expects food poverty to worsen in the UK as the cost of living crisis deepens.

Caroline, who lives and works in County Fermanagh in rural Northern Ireland, would like to get a job with better pay, but to do that she would have to move away from her family and community.

She would also like to stop claiming Universal Credit, but her budget won't allow it.

As her living costs rise, she is trying to make savings, but it's hard.

She puts the central heating on only occasionally and uses coal fires to keep herself and her 11-year-old daughter warm. But she needs her car for work, and the recent hikes in fuel prices have hit her hard.

Her grocery bills are also rising, but in her small community there are only local convenience shops, and big supermarkets where she might find better deals are too far away.

And so she sometimes finds herself falling back on food banks.

The Trussell Trust gave out some 1.9 million food parcels in 2019-2020, to an estimated 370,000 households.

But a record 2.5 million parcels were distributed during during the height of the pandemic in 2020-21, and that only fell back to 2.1 million parcels last year.

The charity is concerned that the situation is only going to get worse again as benefits fail to keep pace with inflation.

The majority of people who use food banks have benefits as their only income, but a significant minority - historically about 14% - are in work.

"What we are witnessing is an accelerating crisis across the country," Trussell Trust boss Emma Revie tells the BBC.



Tim, 36, had seasonal work at Christmas in north-west London, but has been out of a job since then.

The Chelsea fan has been studying part-time but has been unable to get a job in retail, where he has previous experience.

He says "it is not an extremely good feeling" to have to use food banks, and he feels "slightly apprehensive and anxious" about the cost of living crisis getting worse.

His electricity bill has doubled since the energy price cap rose in April, with another rise expected later this year.

A government spokesperson said: "We recognise the pressures on the cost of living and we are doing what we can to help, including spending £22bn across the next financial year to support people with energy bills and cut fuel duty."

They also said it had given many workers on Universal Credit a tax cut, lifted the minimum wage and provided extra funds to councils to help the hardest hit.

'Heating and eating'

However, Ms Revie says the charity has been "disappointed" in the government's actions. In particular she criticises a decision to reverse a £20 a week uplift for all Universal Credit claimants last year.

Ms Revie is also concerned that if energy prices continue to rise, people will be forced to choose between "heating and eating".

"There are health implications from not being able to stay warm, just as there are health implications of not being able to eat," she says.

"People need a safety net so they can bounce back, not fall into destitution."

Labour is calling for the government to set out an emergency budget to offer "real solutions" to the cost-of-living crisis.

"Food Banks are a symptom of economic failure and ministers must now offer real help to working people, disabled people, families and pensioners struggling to feed themselves," shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth said.

For Caroline in Northern Ireland, her situation remains "a bit of a nightmare".

She had to use all of her savings recently to get her car fixed, and she hasn't had a holiday away for five years.

"It's just like a balancing act," she says. "You never know what's going to come at the other end of the scale to tip you off".

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61229727

More than half of UK’s black children live in poverty, analysis shows

Exclusive: Labour party research also finds black children at least twice as likely to grow up poor as white children


Labour’s analysis shows the number of black children in poor households has more than doubled in 10 years. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Alamy

More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty, a new analysis of official data has revealed.

Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children, according to the Labour party research, which was based on government figures for households that have a “relative low income” – defined as being below 60% of the median, the standard definition for poverty.

And over the last decade the total number of black children in poor households more than doubled – although that increase is partly explained by the overall size of the cohort increasing too. The proportion of black children living in poverty went up from 42% in 2010-11 to 53% in 2019-20, the most recent year for which the data is available.

The figures were released to the Guardian by the Labour party, which described them as evidence of “Conservative incompetence and denialism about the existence of structural racism”.

Latest figures estimate about 14.5 million people in the UK are in relative poverty after housing costs (22%), including about 4.3 million children

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has already committed the party to passing a new race equality act, if elected, to tackle structural racism. Further details of what this would entail are expected to be fleshed out in 2022.

The party produced its figures by cross-referencing data from the Department for Work and Pensions’ reports on households below average income with population statistics.

In 2019-20 4.3 million children (defined as people under 16, or aged 16 to 19 and in full-time education) were living in households in poverty. They accounted for 31% of the UK’s 14 million children.

But there was a wide variation among ethnic groups. The Labour research covered nine categories and it said Bangladeshi children are the poorest, with 61% of them living in a poor household.

The figures for the other groups were: Pakistani children (55%); black African or Caribbean or black British (53%); other ethnicity (51%); other Asian (50%); mixed ethnicity (32%); Indian (27%); white (26%); and Chinese (12%).

There are 2.9 million white children living in poverty, making them by far the largest ethnic cohort, comprising 68% of all children living in poverty. Black children are the next biggest group: with more than 400,000 living in poverty, they comprise 10% of the child poverty total.

The Labour figures show that, among some ethnic groups, children are just as likely now to be living in poverty as they were a decade ago. In 2010-11, 61% of Bangladeshi children were living in poor households – exactly the same figure as at the end of the decade.

For Indian children, the chances of living in a poor household have fallen from 34% a decade ago to 27%. For Chinese children, the figure has fallen from 47% to 12%.

But for white children, the figure has risen from 24% to 26%; for Pakistani children, it has gone up from 50% to 55%; and for black children it has increased from 42% to 53%.

Overall, 27% of all children were living in poor households in 2010-11; the latest figure is 31%.

Anneliese Dodds, the shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, whose office produced the figures, said the Conservatives should be ashamed of what they revealed.

“There is little wonder that child poverty has skyrocketed over the last decade when Conservative ministers have done so little to tackle the structural inequalities driving it,” she said.

“Conservative incompetence and denialism about the existence of structural racism are driving black children into poverty. Labour has a plan to lift them out of it, with a new race equality act to tackle structural racial inequality at source.”

Labour announced its commitment to a race equality act as it published a review last year by Doreen Lawrence, the peer, into the disproportionate impact of Covid on minority ethnic communities.

The party has not said exactly what its act would contain, but the Lawrence recommendations, which the party has accepted, would shape its contents.

Although much of the Lawrence report focused on Covid-specific issues, it also said the virus had “thrived on structural inequalities that have long scarred British society”. Its recommendations included forcing large employers to publish data on ethnicity pay gaps, having clear targets to close the attainment gap for children and implementing a race equality strategy that has the support of minority ethnic communities.

Halima Begum, chief executive at the Runnymede Trust, the race equality thinktank, said the Labour figures, although not surprising, were nevertheless “cause for considerable concern”.

She said: “These are not cyclical inequalities that are being flagged, but systemic shortcomings that must be reversed quickly.

“But the problems are nuanced. Black children face racism and poverty. But poverty is not defined exclusively by race. So, for more than a decade, the Runnymede Trust has argued that you can’t simply solve the issue of racial inequality without also addressing socio-economic disparities.”

In response to Labour claims that the figures were an indictment of its record, a government spokesperson highlighted separate figures showing that in 2019-20 there were 300,000 fewer children living in absolute low income, after housing costs, than there were in 2010.

Absolute low income is defined as below the figure for 60% of median income for 2010, adjusted for inflation. People can fall out of absolute low income if their incomes rise by more than inflation, but can remain in relative low income – the more commonly used benchmark – if other people’s incomes rise by proportionally more.

The spokesperson said: “The latest official figures show there were 300,000 fewer children of all backgrounds in poverty after housing costs than in 2010 and we continue to provide extensive support to reduce this number further.

“This includes putting £1,000 more per year on average into the pockets of the lowest earners through changes to universal credit, increasing the minimum wage next April to £9.50 per hour and helping with the cost of fuel bills.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/more-than-half-of-uks-black-children-live-in-poverty-analysis-shows

Even in the States... so e family depends on food bank

So... it's ain't a new thing..

Focus on your relocation...
And give your kids that great life you suffer to enjoy

at least they have help/food banks/gov assistance to help them get through.... have a thought for the 100M or so in Nigeria who are in the same predicament , yet with NO GOV HELP and/or OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE.