UK food insecurity in the 21st century
Dr Neil Boyle, School of Psychology and member of the Global Food and Environment Institute, University of Leeds, reflects on our awareness of the true picture of food insecurity in the UK.
What is food insecurity?
A lack of access to, or a fear of not being able to consistently access, enough food to eat due to insufficient financial resources is at the core of most definitions of food insecurity. For an individual, or household, to be food secure means that all people at all times must be able to access sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and preferences to promote and maintain an active and healthy life. Food security shouldn’t be limited to simply having enough to eat; individuals should be able to access good quality food that is sufficiently varied and culturally appropriate and be able to consume this food in socially acceptable contexts — such as being able to pay for meals outside of the home.
Food security in the UK
Awareness of food insecurity in the UK rose significantly as reports of growing food bank networks and provision emerged in the wake of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Such reports were initially treated with disbelief by many, with food insecurity being perceived as a problem confined to low-income countries or the bread queues depicted in a Dickensian novel. However, the US, which boasts the world’s largest economy and is a global powerhouse in the production of food, has long acknowledged, measured and attempted to mitigate against food insecurity in public policy. Contrastingly, a formalised, representative measure of food insecurity was not collected in all four nations of the UK until 2019, over a decade after the initial proliferation of food bank demand was reported.
The inclusion of the USDA Adult Food Insecurity Module in 2019–20 Family Resource Survey (FRS) was the first large, nationally representative attempt to measure food insecurity in the UK. On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, 8% of UK households reported being food insecure in the last 30 days, with low (4%) or very low (4%) household food security. A further 6% of the population lived in households that were marginally food secure. Food insecurity was particularly prevalent among single-parent households (29%), households in receipt of Universal Credit (43%), Black/African/Caribbean/Black British households (19%), and households with one or more disabled adults (19%). All signs indicate that food insecurity has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Food Standards Agency’s Food and You Survey — a smaller, less representative sample that excludes Scotland — reported 16% of households were food insecure (9% low, 7% very low) in the last 12 months during the first wave of COVID-19. This compares to 10% in 2016 when the Adult Food Security Module was first added to the Food and You Survey.
Food bank data — an incomplete measure of food insecurity
The paucity of large-scale, representative data in the UK prior to 2019 impairs attempts to trace the incidence or trajectory of food insecurity in the 21st century. This lack of formal data imposes a reliance on proxy markers to give an approximate indication of the prevalence of food insecurity. Food bank data is uniquely useful in this regard as it has been reported longitudinally since food bank networks and usage started to increase circa 2005. Despite some issues with the granularity of food bank statistics — e.g. identifying unique users — the data certainly suggest that the prevalence of food insecurity in the UK has increased significantly since 2005, particularly post-recession in the wake of welfare reform and ‘austerity’, and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This evidence, combined with the rich and detailed qualitative first-hand accounts of those living under the spectre of food insecurity, have provided an invaluable insight into the prevalence and experience of food insecurity in the UK in the 21st century. However, food bank data gives an incomplete indication of the experiential range of food insecurity. Measurement scales of food insecurity commonly differentiate between the severities of insecurity faced. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation’s Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) rates the experiential severity of food insecurity on a spectrum from mild — uncertainty about one’s ability to obtain food, to moderate — compromising on the quality/variety of food and reducing the quantity of food eaten, through to severe food insecurity — no food for a day or more. Those that access food bank provision are likely to fall towards the severe end of the scale — a significant proportion of food bank users report being destitute — and therefore can be considered a fractional, non-representative subset of the food insecure population. Mild and moderate food insecurity — e.g. worry over capacity to reliably obtain food and compromising on the quality of food — are associated with profound negative effects on mental and physical health and are likely under-represented in food bank data. It is also evident that the majority of those in need will not access food bank provision and will therefore remain unacknowledged.
What is the true picture of food insecurity in the UK?
The societal and personal impacts of food insecurity are too great to rely on approximation. The inclusion of the USDA Food Security Measurement Module in the FRS ensures the standardised, direct measurement and monitoring of food insecurity in the UK from 2019 onwards. This will permit a clear measurement of the existing prevalence and number of those on the margins of falling into food insecurity across the experiential range, how it changes longitudinally and in relation to interventions and national policy, and the role it plays in deleterious social and health outcomes. However, the adoption of the USDA Food Security Measurement Module should not be considered a perfect solution. Firstly, the collection of quantitative data does not always naturally lead to action; there needs to be political will and public pressure to enact necessary interventions. Further, the timeframe adopted only relates to the last 30 days — rather than the commonly administered 12 months — which has been shown to underestimate food insecurity levels. This measure also only accounts for food insecurity at the household level without specific reference to potential variability within households. For example, questions refer to adults only meaning no indication of the level of food insecurity in children will be available; children are the most likely to experience poverty and therefore may be particularly vulnerable to experiencing food insecurity. Recent data collected from 3704 Shropshire primary and secondary schoolchildren in autumn 2020 showed that as soon as any level of food insecurity was experienced, the child or young person’s psychological wellbeing was significantly lower than food secure peers; suggesting children are unsurprisingly also particularly vulnerable to the impacts of food insecurity irrespective of the degree experienced.
Efforts to alleviate food insecurity will need to acknowledge the wider societal and political context in which insecure access to food has developed. Targeting the problems of food insecurity in isolation may result in solely food-based solutions (e.g. food charity, redistribution of surplus food) and neglect of the wider overarching societal and economic problems, particularly the government’s strategy to alleviate poverty and the causes of poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity among existing vulnerable groups and led to newly food insecure populations. Changes to government social policy may now be needed more urgently than ever to reduce food insecurity among the UK population. The direct measurement of UK food insecurity may be long overdue; the UK Government’s response to hunger in its population, and acknowledgement of the life-limiting effects on children, in particular, is positively tardy.
