City Hall’s latest poverty figures show millions of Londoners facing a dire situation only growing worse. Almost one in five are ‘financially struggling’; nearly a third say they are ‘just about managing’. One in five of those earning less than £20,000 report having been forced to go without food or rely on emergency help in recent weeks. The situation is worse for Black and Asian Londoners, and for deaf and disabled Londoners, who experience greater financial struggle. A quarter of our pensioners live in poverty, and hardship increases each day, meaning more hunger, malnutrition, illness, and disease—health inequalities which shorten the lives of the poorest.

In London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, there is no reason for us to be unable to feed everyone. Despite that, access to sufficient food and nutrition remains down to the luck of draw. It is your postcode which decides whether or not your child gets free school meals and the level of emergency food assistance. The competitive funding of food projects means our communities and council estates have to fight each other for tiny grants to help provide nourishment. Some workplaces now even have food banks for their own staff: in the case of retail, employers organise donations to food banks as part of their ‘corporate social responsibility’, only then to have their own employees on low pay forced to turn to emergency food provision to feed their own families.

Since the 1960s, UK governments have failed to give the Right to Food a legal footing, despite signing numerous UN covenants supporting it. Since the 2000s, we’ve seen consistent lobbying by various NGOs, but still no Right to Food. All the time, public health resources are taken away and hunger, malnutrition, and destitution creep deeper into our communities.

Enough is enough. We need our City Hall to step up and take a wholesale approach to organise the provision of food, during this crisis and after. For Right to Food London, this means three urgent steps, as set out in our petition to London’s Mayor:

1. Universal free school meals for all primary and secondary children.
2. A network of community kitchens, including the use of our school kitchens.
3. Open access to emergency food centres (food banks) by ending the referral system and means testing.

We focus on schools because they are a cornerstone in delivering the Right to Food. Providing all children with nourishing food not only supports struggling families but enables children to learn and develop well. Providing universal free school meals is only way to end stigma of means testing and of dinner debts.

At present, school food provisioning—including nurseries and holiday programmes—is a huge profit-maker, which through public control of procurement and catering could be organised for the benefit of children’s health, not private companies. There is a school kitchen near every council estate, but our communities cannot use them because they are contracted, often, to multinational catering companies. We must demand access to these kitchens when not in school use, so we can provide ‘community kitchens’ or ‘community restaurants’ to feed all in need.

Charity food projects as they exist at the moment, meanwhile, are largely run by unpaid workers. Work by faith groups and volunteers is sincerely respected, but as many themselves acknowledge, it is not a replacement for a functioning welfare state or for community food and nutrition jobs. These were once part of public health, called ‘public health nutrition’, but this vital work has been privatised and charitised, replaced with a growing ‘food voluntariat’. Food provision via food banks has no national standards for the conditions of work or nutrition value of food.

The Trussell Trust alone relies on 28,000 volunteer food workers. Many of these volunteers have done this work for free for years, including during the pandemic, and are tired. Some talk of feeling a secondary trauma because of the poverty they see. Often this is alongside such volunteers themselves living in poverty and debt. This is a mammoth show of collective care and solidarity, but it also shows the ‘food insecurity’ system is not working. It is dysfunctional, unsustainable, and despite best efforts, it is stigmatising and cruel. Tackling food insecurity should not be left in the hands of charities and corporations: it can and should be under public control.

For many in the Right to Food campaign, then, this work is about politicising the food system in London, with the labour movement taking a lead in making that demand. Many trade unionists are already involved in food bank work, often working during the day and volunteering in the evenings or on weekends. Food insecurity is fundamentally an issue for the labour movement, not only to ensure that communities have enough to eat, but to ensure that food workers themselves are paid properly and not exploited and used to undermine the welfare state.

Until things change, and for good, we will be organising in our city’s communities to feed all in need. Together with the national Right to Food campaign spearheaded by Ian Byrne MP and Fans Supporting Foodbanks, we are building the campaign across London—in football and other sports clubs, and in communities, workplaces, schools, colleges, and faith groups. From October, there will be Right to Food marches in boroughs, starting with Lewisham on 1 October; the day after, we take the fight to Tory Party conference. From the grassroots, street by street and borough by borough, we can build a city that takes responsibility.