Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Last year, I spoke about one of my constituents who was fearful that the Government’s cutting the universal credit uplift would mean that they had to choose between heating and eating. They lost £80 a month due to that Government cut, and their energy prices had already risen by £95 a month. That was in November, but the outlook is even more bleak now and we hear more and more often of that choice between heating and eating. The next few months will see too many people already under great stress plunged beneath the poverty line. Inflation is set to rise at almost double the rate of benefits, which means that the Chancellor’s support package will not protect those most at risk of hardship.

I have a family in my constituency who receive universal credit, who are subject to the benefit cap and who already have rent arrears. The mother has told me that she is really struggling to pay her bills and is finding it difficult to feed her five children. The financial pressures mean a continued strain on her mental health and wellbeing. Every week, I and my team deal with so many cases like that.

A year ago, I joined a small group of people in Salford, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), who wanted to find a way to give additional support to local families in need. Led by Antony Edkins, who has been a headteacher in my constituency, we set up the Salford Families in need Meal Project. Across the year, we have raised funds to enable a food club to be run every week in partnership with the social food charity, the Bread and Butter Thing. Our food distribution hub, run at Barton Moss Primary School in my constituency every Wednesday, provides a bridge between food bought from supermarkets and the crisis food given out by food banks. The families in my constituency who use the food distribution hub are among the 20,000 people across the north who now get affordable food distributed by the Bread and Butter Thing. Membership of that charity has grown by 270% in the past year, which shows just how much the levels of food insecurity have increased.

A report from the cross-party think-tank Demos says that the Government are failing to ensure that there are longer-term interventions to help people move out of food insecurity. Families in food insecurity can also have need for other types of help. Mark Game of the Bread and Butter Thing said:

“it’s about so much more than food. People need access to healthy, nutritious, affordable food within an ecosystem of local services providing employment, mental health, debt counselling, housing support and more.”

That range of needs was underlined by Victoria Unsworth, the local primary school headteacher, who helps run the food distribution hub in my constituency, when she said this to me recently:

“I cannot begin to tell you how, in the last few weeks, the need has increased. We have families with food shortages, removal from houses, living in houses with no toiletries, no heating, no electricity…parents splitting up, homeless. These are just the ones we know of.”

It is shameful that the Government are forcing people into these conditions. Families are breaking apart. How can the Government talk of levelling up when this is happening on their watch?

This cost of living crisis will have an impact on health, as we have heard earlier in this debate. Not being warm enough and not having enough food have consequences for our health, both physically and mentally. The Government have said that they want to reduce inequalities in healthy life expectancy, but that is impossible when 1 million adults go whole days without eating, and 9% of the population are experiencing food insecurity.

Today, the Manchester Evening News focuses on the fact that, for the first baby born in 2022 at a Bolton hospital whose family live in my constituency, life expectancy will be more than 10 years less than it is for a child living in a more affluent suburb in the south of England. The paper quite rightly says to the Government on behalf of those babies born in Salford and other northern cities in 2022, “Don’t leave us Behind”.