Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent estimate her Department has made of the level of household food insecurity in the UK; and pursuant to the Answer of 12 September 2016 by the Minister of State for Health to Question 44475, when the Government expects the data provided to the Voices of the Hungry project to be published.

The Government annually publishes Family Food, which draws on data from the Living Cost of Food Survey. This publication includes questions on household spend on food, including that by the lowest 20% income households, which has remained constant at around 16% for a number of years.

The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), developed by the Voices of the Hungry project of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is used to collect food security data in up to 150 countries under the Gallup World Poll. The Department for International Development supports this work financially and updated results will be published later this year by the FAO. We understand from the FAO that global FIES results will be launched in June, and the individual country level estimates, which are three-year averages, will be published in September.