Food Banks on the Policy Agenda
Welfare and benefit changes over the last decade have helped trigger an alarming increase in the number of people seeking emergency food aid in Britain, according to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research carried out by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute’s Hannah Lambie-Mumford. Her collaborative work with Britain’s foremost charitable network of food banks, the Trussell Trust, is already changing the nature of the national debate about the causes of food hunger and poverty in the UK, and has helped shape the terms of reference of a recently formed All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry established to investigate the issue.
The all-party inquiry — the brainchild of Labour MP and welfare specialist Frank Field — was set up in April and is chaired by the Bishop of Truro. One of its first actions was to demand the immediate publication of a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) report into the growth of food banks, of which Hannah had been the lead author.
One national newspaper even speculated that the report was being ‘suppressed’ because its findings made uncomfortable reading for the Department of Work and Pensions as it provided, for the first time, clear evidence linking the expansion in food banks to welfare changes.
At the time, Frank Field said that he “was really concerned that we were just neglecting the issues, and allowing food banks to become a part of the welfare state, with us asleep.” Since then, it is widely acknowledged that Hannah’s work has woken politicians and policy makers to the underlying issues behind the growth in food banks and the rise in household hunger.
The ESRC which has funded Hannah’s doctoral research, also recently awarded her a national prize for the ‘outstanding impact’ of her work, which recognised that she has “provided policymakers, the charitable sector and media with thought-provoking evidence to inform the food poverty debate.”
Hannah told Discover: “We urgently need to know what is driving the rise in demand for food banks and to come to a better understanding of the kind of emergency food system that is emerging.
“This also means looking at the relationship between emergency food charities and the welfare state and where on-going reforms might be leading us. What we are seeing in local communities, particularly with the reforms to local welfare assistance, is that food banks are becoming increasingly important to how local welfare systems operate.
“It is difficult to get a clear picture of what is happening across the country and the lack of data on hunger makes it even harder to understand how many people are struggling to feed themselves and their families well and the best ways to respond. This makes the role of the researcher all the more important in producing accurate and robust evidence.”
In a worrying prognosis she added that the Trussell Trust is now providing more than a million food parcels to people each year. “State based services and benefits are retreating to such an extent that we could be just a hop, skip and a jump away from charitable food banks and other community-based projects being the only forms of support for people in real crisis,’ she said.
