Social care services have said that it is outside their scope to ensure there is food in the house

As many as a million older people are starving in their homes through loneliness according to MPs who have called on ministers to redirect funds into schemes such as lunch clubs.

Isolation from relatives and friends is a bigger cause of malnutrition in the elderly than poverty, they say, and the winter fuel allowance should be means-tested to free money for meals on wheels and lunch clubs.

Supermarkets should have “slow checkout lanes” so that older people can get enough to eat by shopping without rushing, the all-party parliamentary group on hunger recommends.

It reports cases where people have gone without meals for weeks after losing a partner or wasted away over many months because they had no one to help them cook. Others have