Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the effect of the £20 uplift in universal credit on trends in the number of claimants using food banks.

No assessment has been made.

Food banks are independent charitable organisations and there is no consistent and accurate measure of food bank usage at a constituency or national level. Throughout this pandemic, this Government has delivered an unprecedented package of support to protect jobs and businesses alongside injecting billions into the welfare system.

We take the issue of food insecurity seriously, which is why we added internationally used food security questions to the Family Resources Survey in 19/20 and published the data in March this year. Food insecurity data from the Family Resources survey for 20/21 is not yet available. Data is not collected at constituency level.