Child Food Poverty

Debate between Matthew Pennycook and Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent

Friday 16th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I thank my colleagues who have kindly stayed behind on a Friday afternoon for this important debate.

I wish to speak on an issue that is close to my heart and of great consequence for my constituents and many thousands of children and families across our country—the hidden horror of holiday hunger in the United Kingdom. It is not uncommon to have disagreements across the House—each of us has come to this place with strong beliefs and a mandate to pursue them—but there is one thing on which I hope we can all agree. It is a simple question the answer to which serves as a barometer of our progress towards creating a fair society: are our children going hungry? It might be easy to ask, but the answer is hard to bear. In the 21st century in a civilised society such as ours, there are certain social and health issues that should have been confined to the history books, such as rickets, malnutrition, and starvation, but, unbelievably, in communities across the country, health and education professionals are seeing the impact of these things daily.

In my constituency, in Stoke-on-Trent North and in Kidsgrove, 31% of children are living in poverty. One third of our children are born into families living hand to mouth, struggling to make ends meet, pay the bills and feed the kids. The Government’s new index of multiple deprivation makes clear the scale of the problem. Stoke-on-Trent is ranked as the 13th most deprived authority out of 326. In one secondary school in my constituency, 52% of pupils qualify for free school meals.

Even these statistics do not do justice to the terrible reality of poverty in my city and our country today. The situation is bad enough during term time. Stories have reached me of children fainting in school on a Monday morning because they have not eaten since the Friday before. Others are surviving on little more than a packet of crisps a day. For these children, their school meal can often be the only hot meal they get. It has long been understood by all parties in the House that many families struggle to afford to pay for school meals during term time. In fact, free school meals were first introduced in 1906 and remain an established part of our education system over a century later.

But lunch is just one meal, and many schools have gone even further in their attempts to ensure our children are well fed, with breakfast and after school clubs becoming more and more common. Teachers recognise the clear link between hunger and concentration in the classroom, and who with a heart could ignore a hungry child in front of them? These projects make a huge difference and ensure that our most vulnerable children are receiving the nutrition they need during term time. Last week, the Prime Minister said we needed to do more to nurture the educational attainment of our young people. He was speaking of the dangers of truancy to our children’s aspiration, and he had a point, but if our children are not coming to school well fed and ready to learn, their presence alone will not be enough to bridge this divide in outcomes.

The issue is even worse when our children are not at school. What happens to our kids when school is out and the holidays loom? How can we expect them to achieve their potential when they are returning to school in September malnourished? Let us not be in any doubt—that is exactly what is happening at present.

The statistics are stark. A recent report by Kellogg’s on isolation and hunger in the school holidays found that a third of parents skipped a meal so their kids could eat during the school holidays. Six out of 10 parents with household incomes of less than £25,000 said they were not always able to afford to buy food outside term time. For households with incomes of less than £15,000, that figure rises to a staggering 73%. We must never forget that behind each of these statistics is a child, a parent and a family.

The impact of holiday hunger can be seen elsewhere, too, as in the increase in food bank usage during the school holidays. In 2014, the Trussell Trust saw food bank usage in August increase by 21% compared with the same time in June, before the holidays began. These problems are exacerbated by the hidden costs of school holidays. Lone parents are particularly hard hit, with a 2014 survey indicating that 29% had reduced their working hours to look after their children during the school holidays, and 22% had taken unpaid leave.

The trends are only getting worse. Disgracefully, child poverty is set to rise, not fall, in the next five years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that 3.5 million children, which is one in four—let me repeat that: one in four of our children—will be living in absolute poverty by the end of this Parliament.

This crisis is not just a tragedy in its own right, as it is having a major impact on educational attainment, which threatens critically to undermine social mobility in our country. Teachers say that if a child arrives at school hungry, they will lose one hour of learning time a day. If a child arrives at school hungry just once a week, they will lose over eight weeks of learning over their primary school life—70% of a full school term because they are hungry.

It should come as no surprise to hear that if a child comes to school hungry and malnourished, they are never going to achieve their full potential. Concentration, behaviour, the ability to learn—all these are affected if a child is not receiving the sustenance needed to get through the day.

To be candid, not enough research is available about the impact on attainment for limited periods of malnutrition —a situation we very much need to rectify. We do know, however, that for those suffering from severe malnutrition, a lack of concentration is the least of their worries. Organisations such as Save the Children have produced comprehensive reports detailing how long-term malnutrition causes devastating and irreversible damage to children globally. I would like to take this opportunity to extrapolate the findings to this situation.

A lack of nutritious food, combined with illness and infection, leads to a condition known as “stunting” in which children’s bodies and brains do not develop properly. Stunting has a real and demonstrable impact on a child’s mental development, which in turn affects relative IQ and the ability to learn. The link between childhood malnutrition and future attainment has also been identified. Stunted children are predicted to earn on average 20% less than their healthy counterparts.

We cannot start to narrow the gap in pupil attainment until we recognise the gulf in opportunity between our poorest students and the rest. Nor can we expect teachers, even great teachers, to keep a child’s development on track without dealing with these structural inequalities. We cannot pretend that inspiration can overcome starvation.

The repercussions of holiday hunger resonate far beyond the classroom. There is increasing evidence that many students backslide academically during school holidays. A 2014 report by The Times Educational Supplement reported that 77% of primary school leaders and 60% of secondary school leaders had concerns about summer learning loss among their pupils. This regression is far more pronounced in our poorest and most vulnerable communities—and that, too, should come as no surprise because the issues are not solely related to food, but touch on wider social inequalities.

For parents struggling to put food on the table during the school holidays, finding the money to provide their children with the programmes and activities that occupy their more privileged counterparts is an impossible dream. For these kids—the kids I see in my constituency, week in, week out—the summer holiday is not some childhood idyll of splash pools and camping trips. It is not a chance to explore or create. It is boredom, hunger and isolation. That is why I am asking the Government to work with us and begin taking positive steps to tackle the problem of holiday hunger in our country.

We need to do that holistically, and thankfully we do not need to start from scratch. Up and down the country, we have seen examples of local, community-focused projects that are attempting to provide children with the nutrition they need outside term time. In my constituency, several schools run summer programmes funded through the pupil premium, but they are sadly limited to two of the seven weeks. In other parts of the United Kingdom, we see projects such as the one run by the M32 group in Stretford, an out-of-school club that fed an average of 100 kids a day over four weeks this summer, and the summer play scheme set up by Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing, which worked with other agencies to provide activities for young people. The provision of healthy meals was the cornerstone of that scheme.

In Stoke-on-Trent, we have schools and community groups that are willing and able to work with me, and with the Government, to ensure that our kids are being fed during the school holidays. The local food bank is seeking to make links with the Cinnamon Network’s MakeLunch project, which provides lunches for children who otherwise would not have them during the school holidays. The will is there; what is lacking is the financial support to get local pilot schemes off the ground so that they can start to tackle the problem.

What amazes me is that we have ignored this issue for so long while other countries have recognised that they have a basic responsibility to feed their communities. In the United States, not only is holiday hunger nationally recognised as a serious issue, but the measures to alleviate it are federally funded. It is time for the UK Government to step up, acknowledge the scale of the problem, and work with stakeholders to develop a framework for ending child food poverty, in term and out.

In recent days, the Government have been quick to dismiss these issues as having somehow been brought about by the families themselves, or as the inevitable consequence of “'tough decisions”. Far from making tough choices, however, the Government are taking the easy option in this regard, and it is the most vulnerable who bear the brunt. Ignorance or looking the other way is not an excuse. It is easy to stand here, in the middle of a palace, and denounce the poor as feckless. It is easy to pontificate, from a position of comfort and security, about the failings of those at the bottom. It is easy—all too easy—to say that if people cannot afford to eat, it must be because they are not working hard enough or not spending their money wisely enough, or even that they should not have had kids in the first place. We know better than that. We know that the majority of children living in poverty today are in working households. We know that 43% of children in poverty are living with two parents, one of whom is employed. We know that a Government who talk of making work pay are stripping tax credits from those who need them most.

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful and compelling speech. More than 10,000 children in my constituency face steep reductions in their tax credit support next year. Does my hon. Friend agree that in the light of the impending withdrawal of that support, the measures that she recommends are more important and urgent than ever?

[Ruth Smeeth]

I could not agree more. In my own constituency, 10,800 young students will be affected by the cuts.