With Britain’s food banks reporting their busiest few months on record, the signs of human wreckage and suffering caused by the cost-of-living crisis are becoming painfully clear. Just as clear are the lessons that will need to be applied by Labour leader Keir Starmer, as he fleshes out his plans for government, if our country is to eliminate the need for food banks by 2030.
A legal ‘national minimum’
First, there is the need to establish, in the words of Beatrice Webb, a ‘national minimum’. This would place a duty on the state to preserve certain standards of living below which no one is allowed to fall – let alone be shoved beneath. Such a minimum must form the bedrock of an anti-hunger strategy, as it did in the Webbs’ campaign for the prevention of destitution.
A potential move in this direction can be found in the Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future, commissioned by Starmer, which recommends placing a new legal duty on the state to ensure “no person shall be left destitute”. Such a duty would prohibit the state from pursuing policies which leave people reliant on food banks, including the present regime of benefit sanctions and the high rate of deductions from Universal Credit.
Extending free school meals and Healthy Start
Second, inspiration can be drawn from Hubert Bland, a founding Fabian who in 1905 published a tract outlining “a plan for the state feeding of schoolchildren”. Today, an incoming Labour government would need to strengthen the nutritional safety net by maximising take-up and extending coverage of both free school meals and Healthy Start, an NHS scheme through which families on low incomes with children under the age of four receive at least £4.25 a week toward fruit, vegetables, and milk.
The best estimates suggest that around 200,000 children in England are eligible but not registered for free school meals; a similar number of babies and young children are missing out on their Healthy Start entitlement. A Labour government should shift the basis of registering for both schemes, from ‘opt in’ to ‘opt out’, so as to maximise take-up among eligible families. As an immediate move, Labour should throw its weight behind the backbench bill being brought forward by Emma Lewell-Buck MP, which would apply this automatic registration system to Healthy Start.
Questions around eligibility, too, would need to be addressed by an incoming Labour government. At present, around 800,000 poorer children are deemed ineligible for free school meals, usually because their parents are disqualified from applying on the grounds of earned income. London mayor Sadiq Khan has already moved towards a radical plan, guaranteeing free lunches for all primary school children for a year.
It remains to be seen whether universal free school meals might become a national policy, or if a more incremental reform to eligibility criteria could ensure, at the very least, that no child living in poverty is disqualified from the scheme – both during and outside term time, with the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme linked to free school meal entitlement.
Co-operative food clubs
The third part of Labour’s anti-hunger strategy should aim to transform the role and characteristics of community food provision in our country, by moving it away from crisis support and food parcels and towards co-operative food clubs which embody dignity, belonging, and mutual self-help.
Feeding Britain supports a network of 250 food clubs, such as pantries and social supermarkets, which are successfully extending the reach of co-operative principles further down the income distribution. They help people stretch their budgets further, offering good food at relatively cheap prices as well as on-site income maximisation and credit union services.
An innovation fund to accelerate the development of these community-led initiatives would play a key role in making good food and vital services more affordable and accessible in working-class areas, and in cementing the shift from ‘food bank’ to ‘food club’.
The Biden-Harris administration has published an ambitious strategy to eliminate hunger from America by 2030. If Labour wins the next general election, three policies – a national minimum to underpin household incomes, a stronger nutritional safety net, and support for food clubs – could similarly put Britain on a path toward ending the need for food banks by the end of this decade.
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