Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Rebecca Long Bailey Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

The Food Foundation found this week that more than 1 million people have reported

“that they or someone in their household have had to go a whole day without eating in the past month because they couldn’t afford or access food.”

The north-east and north-west of England have the highest levels of food insecurity. I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) in celebrating the brilliant Salford Families in need Meal Project. I also thank For the Love of Food, Salford food bank, Emmaus, Salford Food Share, Mustard Tree, Salford Loaves and Fishes and so many others. They are brilliant organisations, but the fact is that they should not need to exist. As Oscar Wilde once said, charity is not a solution to poverty, but

“an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

As one of the richest economies in the world, we have the economic means to sustain everyone, but if we cannot find the political will to achieve that, we will not live in a civilised society; we will live under barbarism. We can see that barbarism take form and the stark inequities of our system laid bare every single day.

Today, amid an energy crisis that will cripple households across the UK, oil giant BP has reported its highest profit for eight years, yet we are seeing no political action from the Government—no windfall tax on energy companies to help those who struggling. Yesterday, the Government forced through a real-terms cut to social security and pensions at a time when inflation is skyrocketing, despite more than 30 charities and organisations stating that a real-terms inflation rise is needed for people to keep their head above water.

Then, of course, there is levelling up. Levelling up required a reversal of austerity and significant funding pledges for local government, whose budgets have been slashed in the last 10 years. We saw nothing but warm words in last week’s White Paper. Those warm words will not feed my constituents, so today’s motion is right: we need a national strategy for food. But we need to go further. Food, the basic building block of human existence, should become a legal right.

Salford is already a right to food city. As the right to food campaign suggests, putting that right into UK law would make the Government legally responsible for helping anyone in our communities who was going hungry, for taking action to prevent barriers to accessing food, and for taking steps to tackle the crisis of food insecurity in the UK. That would require the Government to respond by setting out funding, tasks and responsibilities for the public bodies that would need to take action. Action should also include addressing the economic causes of food insecurity, for example, through improving people’s incomes with a real living wage, increasing social security to a level people can actually live on, implementing controls on everyday costs such as utility bills and, longer term, lowering energy costs by bringing energy into public ownership.

Food insecurity in our country is not some abstract horror created by an unknown force beyond our control that can be addressed by benevolence. It is a political choice. The Government can make the political choice to end it and I hope that they take on board these points today.