It’s Time to Enshrine the Right to Food
As the government cuts back on the social safety net amid rising food prices, it's never been clearer that hunger is a political choice – it's time to legislate to ensure everyone has the right to food.
Staff and volunteers pack food parcels at the Norwood and Brixton food bank distribution centre at St Margaret's Church on 27 October 2020 in London. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)
The fear currently being felt across this nation is palpable. Millions are worried that they will freeze or starve in their homes. In the fifth-richest country in the world, how has this injustice been allowed to happen? That is the position that so many face due to political choices taken in the Houses of Parliament.
Research by the Food Foundation in 2020 showed that twenty percent of adults in the UK—around eleven million people—face food insecurity each year. A survey of food industry workers by the bakers union showed that more than a third went without to make sure that others in the house got a meal. They are the ones who produce the food in this country.
Food poverty leads to health and life expectancy inequality, malnutrition, and obesity. Poverty destroys the life chances of future generations in our poorer communities. It affects children’s educational attainment and life chances.
How can we accept that we have more food banks than McDonald’s outlets? When do we collectively accept that the system is broken and failing the people we are elected to represent?
#HungerIsAPoliticalChoice
Hunger is a political choice; fuel poverty is a political choice. They are both choices made by the present government, like the cut to Universal Credit, benefit sanctions, and the erosion of workers’ rights, all alongside a decade of Conservative austerity, which has cut our vital services to the bone.
It is three years since the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty issued his powerful report on the UK, in which he described the horrific impact of the government’s dismantling of the social safety net and the political choices that have led to the injustice of where we find ourselves today. Nothing was done and his warnings were dismissed.
The time for sticking plasters, such as a reliance on thousands of food bank and pantry volunteers and donors, is over. We need systemic change so that all our people might live with the opportunity of health, happiness, and dignity. This is a humanitarian crisis that demands permanent solutions, not tinkering with a system that is broken.
A Right to Food
If reliance on charity alone were considered a sufficient guarantee for basic human needs in the UK, previous generations would not have legislated for universal state schooling and the national health service—solutions to fundamental problems which have transformed this nation for the better. That is why we need to legislate for the right to food.
We need enforceable food rights to ensure that the government of the day is accountable for making sure that nobody goes hungry, and is prevented from making decisions that lead to people being unable to afford to put a meal on the table. Ministers should be under a duty, when setting the minimum wage and any relevant social security benefit, to state how much of the prescribed sum has been calculated for food, because right now it is not enough. How can this be allowed?
We should also legislate for universal free school meals: a nutritious, free school breakfast and lunch for every child in compulsory education. If we accept the universal and compulsory requirement that all children up to the age of sixteen should be in school, why do we break from that principle of universal care, nurturing, and protection in relation to their meals during the day? What a difference that would make to the 4.5 million children going hungry today.
Things must change. With so many trade unions, councils, and community campaigners across the UK calling for the right to food to be put into law, ministers must listen to those voices from across the political spectrum and impress on the chancellor that the buck stops with him. The richest man in Parliament must find a solution and include the right to food in his spring statement, because hunger is a political choice.