Section 4: Impacts of food and financial insecurity

Marmot (Institute of Health Equity (Feb 2020). Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On) states

"If everyone followed Public Health England's eating advice, people in the bottom decile of household income would spend 74 % of their income on food. So, there's not much point telling them follow the healthy eating advice they can't afford."

We need to create the right conditions and recognise the social determinants of health, to allow people to be able to take responsibility for feeding their families healthy food.

Harsh austerity measures including slashed welfare payments and dwindling public services have caused the rapid spread of food banks across Britain, new academic research suggests.

The research (Austerity, sanctions, and the rise of food banks in the UK), "Austerity, sanctions, and the rise of food banks in the UK," noted that increasing numbers of doctors in Britain are witnessing their patients turn to food banks to survive and concluded that the UK government's argument that this trend is the result of supply rather than demand is false.

The study highlighted a concrete link between demand for food parcels and the government's austerity measures. It found demand for emergency food aid is highest in areas where poverty occurs in tandem with reductions in social welfare payments. It also revealed that emergency food assistance is particularly common in regions where high levels of unemployment exist.

In 2010, the Trussell Trust food banks were active in 29 local council areas in Britain. By 2013/14 this number had risen to 251. Over the same period, the Trussell Trust's rate of emergency food aid distribution had tripled, the Oxford University study said.

While soup kitchens have long been present in the UK, the rapid spread of food banks is a recent phenomenon. This new trend has been sharply criticized by the UK's Faculty of Public Health, which warned Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014 that Britain's welfare system was "increasingly failing to provide a robust last line of defence against hunger."

In 2019 over 7,800 people accessed foodbanks in Gateshead (including over 2,500 children), that is an increase of over 20% in demand since 2017.