Summary

Tens of thousands of families in the United Kingdom every year do not have enough food to live on and are turning to sources of non-state charitable aid. This new phenomenon of growing hunger for some of the least well-off people in the country, has emerged alongside a wide-ranging and draconian restructuring of the country’s welfare system since 2010. With reductions in welfare support year on year, the number of people, including families with children, going hungry is rising at an alarming rate and represents a troubling development in the world’s fifth largest economy.

The right to food is a fundamental human right contained in several international treaties to which the UK has long been committed. This right, however, remains unrealized for the increasing number of people, many of whom are families with children, living on the breadline.

The UK’s largest national food bank charity, the Trussell Trust, has documented a 5,146 percent increase in emergency food parcels distributed between 2008 and 2018. In that decade this food bank network went from distributing just under 26,000 parcels a year to handing out more than 1.33 million of them. A wider network of independent food banks has sprung up across the country over the past decade to meet the needs of more people facing food poverty.

Schoolteachers, professionals working in community projects, children’s centers and social workers continue to raise alarm bells about children arriving at school hungry or families relying on schools or childcare settings to ensure children receive one hot meal a day. Many poor families in the UK report increasing hunger. This increase comes despite the efforts of domestic anti-poverty campaigners, charitable food aid organizations, schools and community centers trying to fill the gap. Government policies are either not addressing rising hunger, or worse, are exacerbating it.

The UK, as the fifth largest economy in the world with public spending at approximately 39 percent of GDP, has considerable resources at its disposal to ensure that its poorest families and children do not go hungry and fall through the net of the welfare state. Yet, the UK government is failing to do so. It is failing in particular to ensure that the changes it has made to its welfare architecture, does not leave children and families to fall through the net.

Click to expand Image A couple and their two children leave the food bank in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, after collecting a three day emergency supply of food, April 2019. They told Human Rights Watch the benefit cap left them unable to pay rent and afford food. © 2019 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

This report documents the lives of families living on the breadline, the work of voluntary organizations stepping in to help, and identifies areas where the UK government is falling short in ensuring people’s right to food. It includes the perspectives of people who cannot adequately feed their families, and it looks at how welfare changes have exacerbated those problems. Human Rights Watch also interviewed volunteers and staff at food aid projects, and professionals working in education and family support. The report focuses on the experiences of families with children with access to the welfare benefit system, including families with parents in and out of work. In addition to these interviews, Human Rights Watch examined publicly available data and statistics held and provided by some of the organizations interviewed.

The report examines how this rise in food poverty has intersected with a far-reaching restructuring of how the welfare benefit system works, and austerity-motivated reductions in government expenditure on the welfare budget for children and families. The analysis in this report is limited to cases in England, although the UK government’s international responsibility for ensuring human rights treaty compliance extends to all its regions.

The report does not address the situation of single adults or adult couples without responsibility for children. The report also does not address other poverty-related issues linked to the right to an adequate standard of living, such as lack of adequate housing or heating, or issues specific to food poverty among older people, living on limited fixed incomes such as a state pension, or among people with disabilities. Nor does it address food poverty among asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected or irregular migrants, who do not have access to the public welfare system. Its focus is on the way in which changes to the welfare system in the context of austerity relate to the dramatic increase in food poverty in the UK among families with children.

This report is Human Rights Watch’s first project explicitly focused on obstacles to ensuring the right to food, as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, in the context of a welfare system in a rich democracy with a relatively well functioning rule of law system. Previous work by the organization on the right to food has focused on countries facing famine, or acute food shortages, usually linked to the state’s decision to withhold food from or obstruct access to food for some groups.

The right to food, understood as an integral part of the right to an adequate standard of living, exists in international treaties to which the UK is a state party, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is also set out in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 1996 Rome Declaration—a document the UK helped pioneer—and subsequent voluntary FAO guidelines.

And yet, the right to food, as a human right, has so far played little role in UK domestic policies. It is not part of the UK’s domestic Human Rights Act. The UK has not incorporated the ICESCR into domestic law and provides no legal remedy for those who are denied the right to food. In public debates, the term “human rights” is rarely mentioned when discussing people’s reliance on sources of assistance for food such as food banks, community pantries, pilot projects for children in deprived areas, and low-cost redistribution schemes.

The rise in reliance on food aid has surged over a decade, coinciding with a period in which three successive governments have sought to stabilize growing public fiscal deficits through austerity policies emphasizing significant reductions to government expenditure. Since 2010, in significant part responding to the impact of the global financial crisis, successive Chancellors (the cabinet post responsible for finance and the economy) in a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, and in subsequent Conservative governments, have made the case that financial austerity is an “unavoidable” choice characterized by “tough, but fair” decisions. Each government focused its attention on achieving savings by reducing the overall welfare budget.

Although austerity measures are not violations of rights per se, such decisions should not be taken without examining the impact on human rights. International human rights bodies have repeatedly made this point clear to governments, including the UK. In the UK, the impact of deep cuts in the welfare system since 2010 has been disastrous for poor families’ living standards and in particular their access to adequate food. Our analysis of government data shows that the budget allocated for welfare for children and families has borne the brunt of public expenditure cuts, falling by 44 percent between 2010 and 2018.

Three fiscal policies on the one hand, have exerted a particularly detrimental impact on people on the lowest incomes in the UK. The fiscal policies include caps on benefits, freezing the rate at which benefits increase, and limiting child tax credits to just two children:

Since 2013, the government has introduced an arbitrary financial cap on the amount of welfare benefits a family can receive. The government further lowered the cap in 2016. This cap has negatively affected income levels of families with children under the age of five, and single parents (the overwhelming proportion of whom are women).

For four years, starting from 2016, the government has implemented a freeze on most working-age welfare benefits to “workless” (unemployed) households, so they did not keep pace with inflation, partly reflecting a belief that the “positive and dynamic behavioral effects” of reduced welfare payments would incentivize work among poor people claiming welfare benefits. Data from specialist organizations show that single-parent and two-parent families in the poorest deciles of the population stood to lose between £580-770 and £650-825 respectively per year as a result of these changes. Data also shows that the transition into work has occurred at a rate far below that expected by the government. Welfare advisers have also estimated that 40 percent of those affected by the freeze were responsible for children. Welfare benefits have also not kept pace with rising food prices, even though the government’s own macroeconomic data showed food prices rising faster than income levels for the poorest segments of the population.

A third, particularly egregious policy, which began in 2017, is a “two child limit,” curtailing any child tax credit (a means-tested cash benefit) to families for any child after their first two (with some exceptions, i.e. multiple births, adoption and children born from rape). This arbitrary limit on a means-tested benefit penalizes low- and middle-income families for having more than two children. Although in January 2019 the government announced a partial reversal of this policy, to ensure it is not applied retrospectively to children born before that date, its effect on all families with a third or further additional child born after April 6, 2017, remains in place.

The other major change that has been particularly harmful is the transition to the Universal Credit system, the government’s signature welfare policy that began in 2012 to replace a complex set of six “legacy” social security benefits. Food aid providers, academic researchers and nongovernmental welfare advice providers have established clear links between the restructuring of the welfare system and a marked increase in food poverty among low income families who receive such support.

The Universal Credit system has been beset with delays in its rollout, which remains ongoing. Furthermore, whereas social security benefits used to be paid in advance, this is no longer the case under Universal Credit. The wait for payment is a significant source of delay and debt. It also relies on a punitive system that sanctions claimants by withholding funds from those who do not meet conditions, usually related to showing evidence of being in or seeking employment, while making it extremely difficult to appeal such decisions. These and other problems have made it difficult for claimants to navigate the system and receive needed funds. The official oversight mechanism for auditing public expenditure has raised serious concerns that the new system does not represent “value for money”.

Joanne, a 47-year-old single mother of four, interviewed at Wisbech Food Bank in Cambridgeshire on May 23, 2018, described the impact of benefit cuts on her ability to ensure her children are fed adequately:

The only time I come [to the food bank] is if my benefits have been stopped or cut. I had a sanction once, so they stopped the payment completely … I’ve had cuts to my benefits.… At least the children get a hot meal at school. But they break up for half term on Friday. And until my money gets sorted, it’s going to be a long few days. As a parent you really feel like you’ve let your kids down.… I’ll have to gather my pennies together for a loaf of bread and 50p of butter, so they have some toast.

Emma Middleton, a welfare adviser with 15 years of experience in Hull explained to Human Rights Watch what has happened since austerity programs were implemented:

In the first few years food poverty was not an issue.… You never saw families like that. What we see now is a constant stream of food poverty. Benefits haven’t kept up with inflation, and you can’t survive on welfare. A few years ago, we used to be able to help people with an answer, direct them somewhere for help, but increasingly there’s not much we can do. The safety nets to which we used to direct them, which they may not have known about, aren’t there anymore.

One particularly troubling aspect of the overhaul of welfare and tax policy over the past decade has been the way the government ignored growing warnings and evidence from a range of expert sources that these policies are exacerbating poverty. It is only recently, after almost a decade of implementing these measures, that it began to acknowledge these problems, including for the first time, in February 2019, admitting a possible link between the rollout of Universal Credit and increased food bank use.

However, the government has not established a cumulative impact assessment of its welfare and tax changes as recommended by three UN committees (in 2016 and 2017) and repeatedly by its own domestic national human rights institution (since 2015). There is no clear policy or department that is responsible for ensuring that no one in the UK suffers from hunger as a result of inadequate or curtailed social security benefits or other government policies, or for monitoring food poverty and developing a national anti-hunger plan. In 2016, the government also did away with previously existing child poverty targets and the requirement to develop a child poverty strategy, as part of its broader post-2010 legislative overhaul of the welfare system.

The current government appears to now be taking some steps to address these critiques. In January 2019, a junior government minister tempered the government’s earlier rejection of the criticism of UK government welfare policy by Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, following Alston’s official visit to the country in November 2018. In February 2019, the Work and Pensions Secretary acknowledged that problems accessing welfare payments had led to an increase in food bank usage. The statement was a marked departure from the previous position to deny any link between changes to how welfare worked and food poverty.

In March 2019, the government committed to improve its measurement of household food insecurity but did not take on board other suggestions by anti-poverty campaigners contained in draft legislation to make this a statutory requirement with an annual report to Parliament. Nevertheless, this represents an important step since the government does not systematically gather such data across all parts of the UK at present. Separate pilot schemes have also been funded by the Department for Education and Minister for Children and Families to address children showing up to school hungry in the mornings, and those going hungry during the holidays. Although a further, larger-scale pilot project is now planned, it remains unclear whether the lessons from these projects will develop into more systematic efforts to combat childhood food poverty.

This report is Human Rights Watch’s first project explicitly focused on obstacles to ensuring the right to food, as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, in the context of a welfare system in a rich democracy with a relatively well-functioning rule of law system.

Universal Credit itself can be improved to better respect the rights of people, including those living in poverty, to an adequate standard of living. This report calls on the UK government to use the opportunity of its current pause on the further rollout of Universal Credit to evaluate and address the system’s structural flaws, and not just problems with delivery. The government should also ensure everyone has access to adequate food, including in emergency situations through a system of grants. It should introduce technical changes such as paying benefits in advance to avoid debt from the outset. It should review the excessive use of punitive sanctions, reducing repayment rates on advances, and hardship payments. And it should improve processes by which people in financial crisis can access emergency assistance.

The government should accept the right to food as a basic human right, equivalent to others, and ensure everyone in the UK has access to an adequate remedy for violations of the right to food, including legal remedies and compensation.

It should incorporate ICESCR into domestic law and ratify the revised European Social Charter. It should keep the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights in UK law post-Brexit.

Parliament should quickly pass proposed legislation to measure household food insecurity, which would require the government to do so and report annually to Parliament, and consider establishing a national mechanism for mapping and monitoring food insecurity, food poverty, and vulnerability to food poverty.

The government should also establish clear responsibility and coordination on a national anti-hunger strategy between the various government departments, and should consider reintroducing a definition of poverty, for example as proposed recently by the Social Metrics Commission, and, on that basis, developing a proactive anti-poverty strategy.

The government should also give serious consideration to taking on board recommendations from international bodies to conduct a broader cumulative assessment of the impact of post 2010 austerity-based tax and welfare changes on people living on low incomes (including the benefit cap, the uprating freeze and the two-child limit). It is, for example, well within the government’s power to lift the real value of welfare benefit levels to keep pace with inflation as part of its next budget, particularly to ensure that people have sufficient income to afford adequate food.

International actors, such as the various UN Committees overseeing the human rights record of the UK, and UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights can play a role in providing guidance and recommendations to the UK government.

The cost of inaction is high. The current welfare system overhaul, which places poor people generally at risk and raises particular concerns around poor families with children, is likely to lead to more people becoming food insecure and desperate for help from charities, schools, children’s centers and community projects.

Emma Revie, Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust network of food banks, told Human Rights Watch:

Food banks have tried to stem the tide, but no charity can replace the dignity of people having enough money to afford a decent standard of living. The failure to tackle the structural problems at both a national and local level has left people with nowhere else to turn. We have the power to tackle these structural problems as a nation.

The government will have to re-evaluate the harsh caps, freezes and limits on benefits that have hurt the poorest residents of the UK. Otherwise more people will find that they fall below the line from “just about managing” to having to rely on emergency food aid to meet their basic needs.

The problem of escalating food poverty in the UK can be fixed. But it cannot be fixed without concerted effort by the government to take clear responsibility in developing solutions to the problem, to gather better data, and to muster the political will to revise or change the policies that have led to people going hungry and not being able to realize their right to food. Ensuring that vulnerable people in society do not go without food on the table for their families, and that their basic rights, including their right to food, are protected is a legal duty that the UK government owes its least well-off citizens and residents.

Key Recommendations

Urgent Key Recommendations

The government should announce publicly that it accepts the right to food as a basic human right, and part of the human right to an adequate standard of living, and accept its duty to ensure that no one in the United Kingdom goes hungry. The government should ensure an effective remedy (including legal protection) for those whose right to food has been violated by state action or inaction, so that they can effectively challenge government policy and laws to ensure that everyone has access to adequate food, and that those who do not receive compensation.

should announce publicly that it accepts the right to food as a basic human right, and part of the human right to an adequate standard of living, and accept its duty to ensure that no one in the United Kingdom goes hungry. The government should ensure an effective remedy (including legal protection) for those whose right to food has been violated by state action or inaction, so that they can effectively challenge government policy and laws to ensure that everyone has access to adequate food, and that those who do not receive compensation. The Department for Work and Pensions should take immediate steps to abolish the discriminatory two-child limit policy, both as it applies to “legacy” benefits and as it will apply to future Universal Credit claimants in households with more than two children, and in the interim disapply it to ensure that it no longer affects any child whether or not they were born before April 2017.

The Department for Work and Pensions should consider revising the current system in which Universal Credit payments are made in arrears, to either: Make Universal Credit payments in advance, with no penalty for, or recovery of, overpayment from the first payment; or Offer a one-off, non-recoverable, grant-like payment to cover the period between entering the Universal Credit system and receiving the first payment, and thereafter continue to pay benefits in arrears. This grant should include a cash component, and could also include vouchers redeemable at food retail outlets (supermarkets and convenience stores, rather than food banks).

The Treasury should adopt policies to ensure that relevant welfare benefits are not eroded by inflation and rising living costs (including the cost of food) and thus reducing assistance to beneficiaries.

The government and parliamentarians should support draft legislation seeking to develop a statutory requirement to measure and monitor food insecurity, with periodic reporting to parliament.

The government should establish a cross departmental working group under the supervision of the Cabinet Office — comprised of senior representatives of all relevant departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Department for Education, Department for Health, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Treasury, at a minimum — to review the human rights and policy implications of escalating levels of food poverty, to ensure better coordination between ministries and government agencies, and to take responsibility for developing a nationwide anti-hunger strategy.

Further Key Recommendations

The government should: Establish a cumulative human rights impact assessment of post 2010 tax and welfare restructuring, which is independent of government, with particular attention to impact on people with specific additional protections under domestic anti-discrimination laws and those arising from international human rights treaty obligations.

The Department for Work and Pensions should: Use the opportunity of the current pause in rollout of Universal Credit to review structural failures rather than focusing primarily or solely on delivery and implementation problems; Review the rollout of Universal Credit, with particular attention to areas with documented increase in food bank usage, including examining the possibility of allowing Universal Credit recipients who are pregnant women or families with dependent children to request a return to prior “legacy” welfare benefit arrangements for a fixed period until the rollout schedule is finalized; Consider removing the benefit cap, or in the alternative, increase it so it maintains parity with 2010 levels in real terms; Introduce an explicit prohibition on applying benefit sanctions to pregnant women claimants or claimants with young dependent children.



Methodology

This report is based on research conducted in England between December 2017 and June 2018.[1] On the ground research focused on Wisbech (Cambridgeshire), Kingston-upon-Hull and Oxford (Oxfordshire). Human Rights Watch selected these regions and local authority areas out of an initial, open-ended, interest in investigating links in areas which had high levels of relative deprivation, which had seen rapid increases in levels of immigration, and where populist political positions such as those expressed during the 2016 Brexit referendum had enjoyed support. During a scoping exercise in early 2018, the research centered its attention on the all-too-evident poverty in the areas visited, with a focus on food poverty among families in receipt of welfare benefits and obstacles people face in securing their right to food. The research also examined data and national trends regarding reliance on food aid by consulting available statistics and relevant expert NGOs and academics.

A Human Rights Watch researcher based in the United Kingdom conducted 126 interviews with a wide variety of stakeholders including staff, volunteers and users of food banks and low-cost food pantries; staff and volunteers at community centers, schools, family support and children’s centers; NGOs, churches and academics working in the areas of poverty, and in particular food poverty and child poverty; and some local authority representatives.

Most interviews were conducted in private (where the interviewee was interviewed in their place of paid or voluntary work) or as conversations in public spaces (such as food banks, food pantries, community centers and cafes) with the interviewee’s consent. Three sets of interviews were carried out as group discussions with established groups of young women familiar with each other, many of whom experienced food poverty. Some interviews were conducted by telephone, and these are indicated as such in footnotes. Where interviews in person or telephone were not possible with service providers, NGOs or officials, or where a query could be resolved without a full interview, Human Rights Watch sought responses in writing, and these are also indicated clearly in footnotes. All interviews were conducted in English.

Interviews were semi-structured and covered a range of topics relating to welfare, rights and access to food. Before each interview the researcher described Human Rights Watch’s work and explained the purpose of the research and its voluntary nature and sought verbal informed consent for the interview. All interviewees were told they could decline a question or could end the interview if they chose to do so. Interviewees did not receive compensation or remuneration for participation, but in some cases the researcher provided a modest sandwich meal and drink when the interview took place during mealtimes.

Real names of interviewees are used, except where the interviewee requested that we use a pseudonym or refer to them simply by their professional role. Those who opted to use a pseudonym largely did so owing to the stigma associated with being identified as poor and reliant on food aid. Pseudonyms are indicated clearly as such with quotation marks on the first use in relation to each interview requesting anonymization.

In addition to interviews, Human Rights Watch examined other reports, legislation, policy documents and publicly available data and statistics held and provided by some of the organizations interviewed. Data on public expenditures comes from the HM Treasury Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis publications while other economic (including gross domestic product data and inflation indices) and demographic (population totals) data is from the Office of National Statistics.[2] For inflation adjustments, the Consumer Price Index used was the all items index and the index was set to 2016 pounds.[3] Per capita adjustments used the full (all ages) population.

Human Rights Watch sent letters detailing our key findings and requesting comment and clarification to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Chief Secretary to the Treasury; the Secretary of State for Education; and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families. We received replies from the Department for Education, HM Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions, which we have aimed to include in the report. Human Rights Watch will publish copies of the responses received from government departments on its website.

The issues discussed in this report arise within a UK public policy debate about poverty among families with children. While the definition of poverty, both relative and absolute, remains contested, many UK sources referred to relate their definition of low income or living “below the poverty line” either explicitly or implicitly to a governmental measurement called Households Below Average Income (HBAI). HBAI is an important basis for understanding UK data around how families are understood to fall within certain income brackets. The approach uses a measure of equivalized household income (before and after housing costs) as a proxy for living standards. The data are updated annually. As of March 2019, a household is said to be in relative low income (or relative poverty) if its household income is below 60 percent of the current median, and a household is considered to be in absolute low income (or absolute poverty) if its household income is below 60 percent of the inflation-adjusted 2010/11 median.[4] The HBAI report satisfies the UK statutory requirement currently set out in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, to maintain and publish data on children living in low-income households.[5] This report also makes reference to a separate Minimum Income Standards approach being developed by a group of academics and public policy practitioners at Loughborough University (including how it relates to a poverty threshold), and a definition of poverty being developed by the Social Metrics Commission, both of which seek to examine factors beyond household income.

The terms “food poverty” and “food insecurity” are sometimes used interchangeably in public debate around reliance on food aid. This report focuses on “food poverty,” as it focuses on decreasing affordability and access to nutritious food for people on low incomes, and makes reference to “food security” and “food insecurity” when referring to more formal, systemic measurements or efforts to develop measurements at the individual or household level.[6]

This statistical information in this report was accurate as of April 4, 2019. It includes developments as of May 10, 2019.

I. Growing Levels of Hunger: From Skipping Meals to Queues at Food Banks

Often, I have nothing left at the end of the week. When you’re a single mum there are very few jobs you can do that let you drop your child to school in the morning, then go to work and be back at 2.30 to pick them up. I skip meals, so my daughter can eat, and coming to a food pantry … means we can both eat. When I skip meals, I get easily tired and don’t have energy, but you get used to it. I’d rather that she have something to eat than me.

– “Sarah Nor”, a 23-year-old woman with a 4-year-old daughter, interviewed at the Goodwin Pantry in Hull[7]

Tens of thousands of families in the United Kingdom (UK) every year do not have enough food to live on, and are turning to sources of non-state, charitable aid. This new phenomenon of growing hunger for some of the least well-off people in the country has emerged alongside a wide-ranging and draconian restructuring of the country’s welfare system since 2010. With reductions in welfare support year on year, the number of people, including families with children, going hungry is rising at an alarming rate and represents a troubling development in the world’s fifth largest economy. The right to food is a fundamental human right contained in treaties the UK has long signed up to, and remains unrealized for the increasing numbers of people living on the breadline.

A series of studies carried out between 2013 and 2018 by domestic anti-poverty organizations, non-governmental food aid providers, and parliamentarians have documented how growing numbers of children and families in the UK have begun to depend on emergency food aid, a phenomenon which was largely unknown in the country prior to 2008.[8] The overwhelming view among these studies is that austerity-led policy making has increased reliance on emergency and ongoing food aid resulting in nongovernmental providers—many of whom did not exist or operated on a much smaller scale a decade ago—to fill this need.

Click to expand Image “Sarah Nor,” a volunteer and pantry user at the Goodwin Community Pantry in Hull, puts fresh produce on the shelves, June 2018. The pantry receives redistributed food from a local scheme and makes it available to community members at low cost. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

Niall Cooper, the director of Church Action on Poverty, a faith-based NGO, told Human Rights Watch:

The growth in food aid over the past 10-15 years has been unprecedented. In 2003, Sustain [a UK based food and agriculture security and sustainability organization] published a Community Food Projects directory. The directory listed over 260 different community food projects across the UK including food co-operatives, community cafés, school breakfast clubs, cooking clubs, food growing projects and farmers’ markets. Only two were specifically described as food banks—one of which was the original Trussell Trust food bank in Salisbury. Now, in contrast, there are 428 food banks within the Trussell Trust network [see below for clarification on numbers from Trussell Trust], and a further 803 independent food banks across the UK.[9]

This human rights crisis affects families and children, and Human Rights Watch research from the field, focused on three communities in England, bears this out. Families with children are facing significant challenges in being able to access their right to food, as an integral and essential part of their right to an adequate standard of living. They are going hungry in a country with ample resources to make sure that does not happen.

A Backdrop of Recession and Austerity-Based Policy

The UK felt the crunch of the global economic crisis beginning in 2007 and lasting into the early 2010s. It was no exception to the global trend.

The recession and the decisions by subsequent UK governments to manage growing budget deficits through a program of public spending cuts is critical background for this report. In particular, the policy choices taken in response to the recession led to cuts to overall welfare spending and a complicated set of changes to many tax and welfare rules, rates, thresholds and limits that had a serious negative impact on poorer people.[10]

As these policies were implemented, reliance on food aid spiraled exponentially, with nongovernmental or charitable organizations stepping in to fill the hunger gap arising from this restructuring of the welfare architecture. A detailed exposition and analysis of policy changes on welfare and tax, essential to fully understanding the rise in food aid, follows in Chapter II.

Families Facing Hunger: A Human Rights Crisis

In England, and across the UK more generally, more families are food insecure or have fallen into food poverty. Families on low incomes, in receipt of benefits, are at particular risk of falling into food poverty or becoming food insecure.[11] In the simplest sense, people experience food poverty or become food insecure when their economic or social constraints mean they cannot afford to consume a diet that meets nutritional needs.[12]

For those who experience food poverty, emergency food aid is a critical resource. Reliance on emergency food aid has increased dramatically in the UK. The Trussell Trust, the main provider of emergency food aid, has seen a 50-fold growth in the last decade (see section immediately below for statistics).[13] Food bank usage, a phenomenon which barely existed two decades ago, has increased exponentially across the UK.[14]

Families with children make up over half of food bank users according to academic research, carried out in large part by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, sometimes commissioned by food aid providers. That research also shows that food bank users are more likely to have dependent children than the UK average.[15] Single-parent households (mostly women-led) are significantly impacted.[16] People with disabilities are also disproportionately affected.[17]

UNICEF’s 2017 survey of “rich countries” highlights the way food poverty and food insecurity are affecting children in the UK. Data shows that approximately one in five (19.7 percent) children under the age of 15 in the UK lives in a situation of food insecurity.[18]

Food Banks: A Key Indicator of the Food Poverty Problem

Food banks are charitable organizations that provide donated food, and sometimes other basic hygiene and toiletry supplies, to people in acute need for free. In the United Kingdom, unlike in other states, food banks are not funded by the state, and are charitable, non-governmental or church or community-led initiatives, catering to a wide variety of people in need of emergency assistance getting food.[19]

Food banks and other schemes which redistribute surplus food at low or no cost to those who need it have grown dramatically in the last decade in the UK. A key indicator of the growth in food insecurity is that many more people in the UK are using food banks.

The former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, has noted that “the uncomfortable reality of food poverty,” which had been widely (but wrongly) assumed to have been eradicated in rich countries, has been rendered visible by the recent emergence of food banks.[20]

Click to expand Image Volunteers at the Wisbech food bank, Cambridgeshire make up an emergency parcel suitable for a large family, April 2019. This food bank can sometimes offer families with children an additional £5 voucher to be redeemed at the local butcher or greengrocers. © 2019 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

The largest nationwide network of emergency food distribution in the UK is organized by the Trussell Trust, an anti-poverty charity that has over 1,200 centers, run by over 420 food banks. These food banks are independent charities, and members of the Trussell Trust network.[21] For the purposes of this report, we use the term “food bank” to refer to both individual Trussell Trust food bank centers and regular food parcel distribution coordinated by other organizations or independent charities.

Food bank users must be referred to the Trussell Trust by professionals or organizations authorized to do so by the Trust, where the referring organization has determined that the person does not have sufficient food to eat in the immediate future.[22] Trussell Trust food bank staff and volunteers have guidance to say individuals can receive up to three three-day emergency food parcels every six months.[23] Other types of food banks may not always require referrals or have guidance on limits of visits or handouts per year.[24]

Click to expand Image Figure 1: Trussell Trust Emergency Food Supplies 2008/09 to 2017/18. Source: Data received from Trussell Trust

The Trussell Trust foodbanks gave out 1.33 million emergency three-day supplies of food in the calendar year 2017/18.[25] The food packages given out by the Trussell Trust consist of packaged food with a long-shelf life, such as tinned vegetables, meat, grains, pasta, sauces, soup, cereal, coffee, tea, and UHT milk. Other food aid providers may offer fresh fruit and vegetables.

The Trussell Trust’s[26] network of food banks has grown exponentially in size since its inception in 2004. The Trust’s food banks have gone from handing out slightly under 26,000 parcels containing a 3-day emergency supply of food in 2008-9 to distributing over 1.33 million such parcels in 2017-18. That is a 5,146 percent increase in a decade.

Emma Revie, Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust, explained the alarming rise in food bank referrals to Human Rights Watch:

No one in the UK should need a food bank. And yet, we’re seeing referrals for emergency food soar year on year. This isn’t right.

We know there are particular issues which lock people into poverty. Benefit payments not covering the rising cost of essentials, and delays or errors with those benefit payments, are some of the most common reasons for referral to a food bank. Funding cuts for local authorities have stripped away local crisis support and charities have been left to pick up the pieces. Low paid or insecure work is behind the damning figure that one in six people at food banks either work or live with someone that does.[27]

Unlike the food banks that make up the Trussell Trust network, independent food banks are not uniformly organized, and follow varied models for collecting and distributing food. As a result, it is difficult to find comparable statistical information for numbers of parcels or the amount of food handed out by independent food banks.

However, the total number of independent food banks has increased dramatically. The Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) estimates that there are 803 independent food banks in operation across the UK at present.[28] IFAN’s most recent published estimates in 2018 suggest that independent food banks make up 38.5 percent of the total number of food banks across the country.[29] The number of independent food banks appears to be growing, as IFAN reported that there were 651 in mid-2017, 774 by mid-2018, and 803 in March 2019.[30]

IFAN’s Coordinator, Sabine Goodwin, explained to Human Rights Watch that the independent food banks she adds to IFAN’s list are “either newly formed or I haven’t come across them yet; usually they are new community-led initiatives,” adding that she also found “that a small number of independent food banks have closed and of course I amend the list accordingly.”[31]

Click to expand Image Food bank distribution forms at Ely Food Bank, Cambridgeshire, February 2018. Volunteers make up three day emergency supply parcels for food bank users based on the size of the family unit. +Detail of what a three-day emergency supply for a “large family" contains. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

Goodwin offered further clarification about her impression that independent food banks are a relatively new phenomenon, pointing to further research she is currently conducting jointly with Rachel Loopstra, a leading expert on food insecurity in the UK:

The number of independent food banks operating across the whole of the UK is in all likelihood growing given my understanding is that most did not exist a decade ago. However, this question needs systematic investigation.[32]

Information previously collected by the Food Access Network (part of the UK organization Sustain) in 2003 suggests only two food banks existed nationally then.[33]

The emergence of food banks is however dependent on voluntary action, and ad hoc responses at a community level. The support they can offer is often time-limited and designed not to encourage long-term dependency. The Trussell Trust network in effect, as seen above, has a guideline limit on the number of emergency three-day parcels a person can receive during a six- or 12-month period. Neither the Trussell Trust network, nor independent food banks which may or may not be affiliated to the Independent Food Aid Network, can realistically be expected to cover the entire country, with a consistent food supply available in all outlets at all times. Nor should volunteers or nongovernmental welfare advisers, however much they are able to achieve on a voluntary or charitable basis, be expected to take on the state’s role of identifying those citizens and residents most vulnerable to fall into food poverty, particularly when this vulnerability arises from problems with access to or levels of state welfare payment.

Click to expand Image Food bank distribution forms at Ely Food Bank, Cambridgeshire, February 2018. Volunteers make up three day emergency supply parcels for food bank users based on the size of the family unit. +Detail of what a three-day emergency supply for a “large family" contains. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

Emma Middleton, a caseworker at the Hull and East Riding Citizens Advice, who has worked there in various capacities since 2003, said that the situation and need for emergency food aid had changed significantly over the last 15 years, as the cost of living increased and the existing safety nets disappeared. She said:

In the first few years [of this work], food poverty was not an issue. The soup kitchens and churches could deal with it, and it was mainly homelessness. You never saw families like that. What we see now is a constant stream of food poverty. Benefits haven’t kept up with inflation, and you can’t survive on welfare. A few years ago, we used to be able to help people with an answer, direct them to somewhere for help, but increasingly there’s not much we can do. The safety nets to which we used to direct them, which they may not have known about, aren’t there anymore.[34]

Food Banks: Only the Visible Tip of an Iceberg

Food aid reliance, however, goes beyond food banks, and the fifty-fold increase in the use of one network of food banks is only one indicator of a much wider level of food insecurity. IFAN’s Coordinator Sabine Goodwin has argued that food bank use is only “the tip of the food insecurity iceberg.”[35]

In 2013, researchers for Oxfam GB and Church Action on Poverty offered a rough estimate that over half a million people in the UK were reliant on food aid, an estimate based on 350,000 individual parcels handed out by the Trussell Trust network that year.[36] No current estimate exists of how many people in the UK rely on food aid more generally (i.e. including, but not limited to, food banks), or how much food aid is available, but it is fair to surmise that it has grown significantly since 2013. This lack of data is an identified gap in UK food security policy. Just as there is no single, comprehensive statistic that captures total food bank use in the UK, nor is there any single statistic about the wider variety of food aid initiatives, which, as a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) commissioned 2014 study noted are “diverse and difficult to document.”[37]

As food banks have multiplied, so too have other types of food aid provision.[38] These include low cost community supermarket and pantry schemes,[39] free or subsidized breakfast and afterschool healthy snack and/or meal provision for children (some of whose families are otherwise unable to afford these items),[40] out-of-term/holiday food provision schemes,[41] soup kitchens, pay-as-you-feel cafes,[42] and charities using and redistributing surplus or near-expiry food delivered to them through schemes like FareShare and independent local initiatives like the Oxford Food Bank.[43]

Surplus Food Redistribution: Free and Low-Cost Schemes

Surplus food redistribution schemes take donated food from supermarkets and other food retailers (bakeries, grocers, wholesalers), including food nearing its expiry date, and offer it to community groups and charities, who, in turn:

cook or prepare for their own planned activities, such as free community lunches, extracurricular programs and preschool age children’s groups;

give away, for free, limited amounts of fresh and packaged food to their service users, as and when available, to supplement what they can afford to purchase; and

set up community-based social enterprise or membership schemes to create a form of “supermarket-like” interaction, where members of a community or participatory scheme can access low cost food, and work or volunteer in the project.

During the financial year 2016-17, FareShare, the UK’s longest-running and largest surplus food redistribution charity, redistributed 10,580 tons of food (plus another 2,972 tons at store level) to 6,723 charities and community organizations, allowing them to prepare an estimated 28.6 million meals.[44] There is no composite figure available for other food surplus redistributors in the UK.

Click to expand Image Low-cost redistributed or near-expiry food available to scheme members at EMS Yorkshire’s community shop in Hull, May 2018. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

Click to expand Image Members of the Goodwin Community Pantry can choose a limited number of low-cost items, every week for a fixed total price of £3 or £5. These are the contents of individual shopping baskets chosen by pantry users, May 2018. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj Click to expand Image Members of the Goodwin Community Pantry can choose a limited number of low-cost items, every week for a fixed total price of £3 or £5. These are the contents of individual shopping baskets chosen by pantry users, May 2018. © 2018 Human Rights Watch/Kartik Raj

FareShare’s national distribution in 2013 was 4,200 tons, a mere 40 percent of the levels it had reached by 2017. The organization’s CEO, Lindsay Boswell, explained in 2013 that increased demand arose from broader socioeconomic pressures, coupled with charities facing tighter budgets, rather than supply simply additional demand:

Last year we fed more people than ever before, but we know the demand for our services is increasing at an alarming rate. The recession, rising cost of living, and unemployment all mean there are more people turning to charities for food.[45]

FareShare reported then that “more than a third of the [food aid] charities FareShare supports are facing funding cuts, with 70 percent fearing demand for their services will only increase in the future.”[46] Demand, in fact, outstripped supply as Boswell explained in a media interview at the time:

What this tells us is that more and more front line charities who are providing front line support to the most vulnerable people are turning to us as a financial coping mechanism because local authority grants, statutory funding and funds from other sources are hard to come by.… If you look at the number of charities out there providing food, we could expand 50 times over. The need is absolutely enormous.[47]

“Community pantries” and “social supermarkets” are a new, and increasingly common, outlets for surplus food distributors. These organizations respond to a routine level of food insecurity and obstacles accessing food for people who are not in an emergency of food insecurity or acute financial crisis.[48] Academic experts refer to this new phenomenon as “austerity retail,”[49] or “alternative food retail enterprises”[50] that simultaneously fulfil a need and a social purpose. Since the establishment of the first social supermarket in 2013, at least seven parent schemes have emerged in England, each with branches, franchises and plans for expansion in other low income areas, some of which are part-funded or supported by local government.[51] There is clear evidence they are growing in number, responding to greater food insecurity.[52] They are organized in a variety of ways. Some are run as parts of a larger charitable organization such as a housing trust, others are social enterprises, and yet others are for-profit cooperatives. What unites them is that they offer food at significantly reduced cost to a membership that is identified through some combination of need, common interest, referral, and/or residence in a geographic area.

Niall Cooper, from Church Action on Poverty, which is currently coordinating the expansion of a scheme of community pantries across the UK,[53] explained the motivation for this sort of project:

The emergence of food poverty has taken us by surprise. I’ve been doing this, working against poverty for 20 years. I would never have said 10 years ago that I’d be running a national campaign to end hunger in the UK or that CAP would be developing a series of low-cost pantries to deal with hunger. Hunger wasn’t even a word that featured in anti-poverty language within the UK five or ten years ago. There’s a need for policy solutions and local programs that give voice and give people a sense of agency and involvement in solutions. We’re developing a network of local food pantries built around principles of dignity, participating in developing your own solutions, and addressing the longer-term issues of food poverty. Food poverty is more than food banks.[54]

How do these low-cost food schemes operate? Human Rights Watch visited two such schemes in areas of Hull which experience high levels of deprivation, the Goodwin Community Pantry in central Hull and EMS Yorkshire’s community shop in East Hull. The Goodwin Community Trust, effectively a charitable neighborhood association in central Hull runs a community pantry for which it receives supermarket surplus produce and non-perishables via FareShare. Members can purchase four items for £1 or 15 items for £3, and choose from a variety of products, including frozen products. The pantry soon plans to expand to carry frozen meat and healthy ready meals. Jan Boyd and Andy Rees, from EMS Yorkshire, a food-related social enterprise that runs a community shop, explained that their social supermarket initially began from a project running community allotments and teaching residents in and around the East Hull estate on which they are based about cooking healthy, affordable food. EMS Yorkshire received funding in January 2016 to pilot a community shop that redistributed surplus collected from local supermarkets to members, who could be residents of any part of Hull whose situation meant that they were finding it difficult to afford food. The scheme allows members (who pay no membership fee) to pay £1 for 4 tins of food or £1 for 4 items from a box of assorted food products and toiletries (e.g. coffee, tea, pasta, rice, noodles, cereal, sanitary products). Their initial estimated membership of 20 people has grown to 85. Jan Boyd explained that the problems with poverty were endemic, but exacerbated by recent welfare changes: “Of the 85 members maybe three quarters have children or grandchildren they’re caring for. There’s one woman who comes regularly who takes care of her grandchild because the mother is in prison. The people on Universal Credit so far are mainly singles and couples. With them we’re seeing that they’re short on money because of problems making joint benefit claims and delays and sanctions because the forms are difficult. There’s a super thin, very pale woman who is sacrificing her food to feed the kids. They take a couple of tins of soup and bread to fill themselves up, so the kids can eat. And families here are taking care of grandchildren and extended family, there’s a mentality of ‘mine, hers and ours’.”[55] Andy Rees expressed concern about the rolling out of Universal Credit to families, saying, “It’s bad already. When Universal Credit gets extended to families it’s going to be awful.”[56]

Schools, Afterschool Clubs and Family/Children’s Centers

Schools, along with children’s centers and family support centers, which also serve pre-school age children and their families in areas of high deprivation, report that they are increasingly finding themselves on the frontline of providing emergency and ad hoc ongoing food aid to families and children they believe to be at risk of going hungry.

Representatives of eleven out of twelve schools and/or children’s or family centers that Human Rights Watch interviewed or exchanged written correspondence with expressed concern about food poverty, their existing ability to offer support whilst being put under further financial strain following cuts to state funding for primary education and children’s centers.[57] One community worker in Hull, who did not wish to be identified when making this point, said, “Schools are getting side-tracked from teaching and they’re doing more and more social work.”[58]

Daniel Stone, a Policy Officer in the National Education Union (NEU), a recently amalgamated teachers’ union which published a survey of over 900 teachers conducted jointly with the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), explained the concerns expressed by head teachers who spoke at their April 2018 press conference:[59]

The teachers who spoke when we published our survey talked about children coming to school clearly hungry, children without warm clothes and dry shoes in winter, in ill-fitting and worn out clothes. Several head teachers talked about tired children, with a grey pallor, poor skin and complexion and an inability to concentrate. And especially Monday morning being very difficult, as kids come in without having eaten. The first thing they do is supply toast and fruit to the kids. And this is even worse when returning from the school holidays. Feeding hungry children is increasingly a priority for schools: providing toast and food at the start of the day, making sure kids from poorer families get a second helping, and packaging up leftovers for the families they know are struggling.[60]

The NEU and CPAG’s survey findings themselves offer a grim picture of the grinding reality that teachers are dealing with. Sixty percent of the survey’s respondents thought that the extent of poverty in their schools and its effect on pupils from low-income families had worsened since 2015. Almost half of respondents said their school directly provided one or more of a range of anti-poverty services: 18 percent said their school runs a low-cost food club; 13 percent reported that their schools runs a free food bank; 16 percent said their school offers free or subsidized family meals.[61] Among those surveyed, over half said they personally provided (out of their own pocket) support for pupils from low-income families, with over a third saying they bring food in for children; with many doing so at least once a week.[62]

It is hard to estimate the totality of food assistance provided by schools in England how much is provided on an ad hoc basis.

Staff at a children’s and family center in Hull also explained that they had begun to receive weekly deliveries from FareShare which they set out on a table, allowing families to help themselves as they drop off or collect their children. They said they always keep a set of pre-packed food parcels back to hand discreetly to those families they over time recognized as those most likely to be in food poverty. As one of the staff said, “Those who don’t ask for the food are often the most needy and we recognize them.”

Teachers spoke of the need to ensure that children whose families were receiving additional food support from the school were not identified and that their privacy and dignity be respected. member of staff at a primary school in an area of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, with high levels of deprivation, with a specific pastoral role supporting families, explained how she assesses and refers families of pupils to the local food bank:

We see kids come in often not having had their breakfast. And there’s lots of reasons for this: some kids aren’t keen on eating in the morning, some households are busy, some parents may not have been shopping. Kids don’t say why, they just say ‘I didn’t eat breakfast.’ If we see it on a regular basis, we contact the parents and ask if we can support them. We maintain a log of concern at the school, and someone will investigate it. Sometimes it’s a recent case of unemployment or benefit change, and we refer them to Citizens Advice or give them a food bank voucher. Years ago, it was harder to approach the issue of the food bank, but now it’s more well known, it’s in the press and on the internet, people are more aware of it.[65]

Another school leader in Wisbech painted a similar picture:

Yes, we see food poverty. Yes, we make food bank referrals. In every class of 30 children, I’d say that school lunch is the only hot meal of the day for between 2 and 5 of them. We have children arriving at school hungry. They usually arrive late, and we ask if they’ve had breakfast. We don’t pry or fish about poverty, but we discuss things like attendance and other concerns about the child with their parents, and encourage them to attend breakfast club, which they can have for free if they are eligible for free school meals. We support some families a lot, through early help assessments, building a team around the child, or just informally.[66]

The first few weeks of every school holiday present an additional challenge for low-income families, who often struggle to ensure that children can eat lunches out of term time. This was a concern among recipients of food aid, teachers, and community and food bank workers alike.

For example, Joanne, a single mother of four, one of whom had just turned 18 and was no longer considered a dependent child, explained the additional burden on finance during holiday periods when speaking to Human Rights Watch a few days prior to a half-term holiday:

I’ve had cuts to my benefits. My oldest daughter is now 18 and is looking for work, so obviously my benefits are cut back. Right now, I have 34p on the gas meter and I can’t top it up until the weekend. You need gas to cook food for the kids. At least the children get a hot meal at school. But they break up for half term on Friday. And until my money gets sorted, it’s going to be a long few days. As a parent you really feel like you’ve let your kids down, especially in the holidays. I’ll have to gather my pennies together for a loaf of bread and 50p of butter, so they have some toast.[67]

In the week leading up to the school summer holidays which began in July 2018, food banks nationwide started to send out alerts over social media saying they were running low on stocks of staple items such as tinned soup, rice, pasta, sugar, or baked beans.[68] By the second week of the holiday, the Trussell Trust was documenting that demand during Summer 2018 was higher than in previous years, and sought additional donations of food warning that stocks were running low.[69] It also stated publicly that it was donating food to holiday clubs, following reports that children were going hungry during the holidays.[70] FareShare, similarly, earlier in the same month announced a program to provide food to 200 holiday clubs around the country.[71]

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger heard evidence from food aid providers and school staff in its 2017 Inquiry that increasing numbers of children were going hungry over the holidays, in recent years. Their study estimated that some three million children went hungry at some point during the holidays, and they forecast a rise in need, attributing this to rising food prices and static wages and benefit levels (Chapter III, below, contains further analysis of food prices in relation to wage and benefit levels).[72]

The government seems to have recognized the increasingly visible phenomenon of “holiday hunger” and the need for “holiday provision”, and announced a new, limited pilot project—the Holiday Activities and Food Research Fund—with £2m of funding, in three regions of England.[73] Critics, however, point out that the limited funding appears to have been a move to stave off an attempt to legislate for a duty on local authorities to make such provision, by delaying those proposals until the pilot projects commencing in summer 2018 were implemented and evaluated.[74] In April 2019, the Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families, Nadhim Zahawi, told Human Rights Watch in a letter that a further £9m had been earmarked for similar projects during summer 2019 in all nine regions of England, adding that the projects would be subject to external evaluation which “will allow the government to consider if and how it should intervene long-term.”[75]

In a similar pilot designed to alleviate hunger among children in poor areas, in March 2018, the Department for Education (DfE) announced a new targeted scheme for additional breakfast club provision, with a promise of £26m funding, in 12 regions, and has now begun the process of rolling this out in targeted “opportunity areas”.[76] The program appears to build on the findings of DfE-commissioned evaluations of breakfast clubs in disadvantaged areas concluded the previous year,[77] although its announcement faced criticism for delay.[78] The two designated charities—Magic Breakfast and Family Action—are actively recruiting schools to participate in this program (and the former continues to support schools through its existing charitable breakfast provision program already operating in almost 500 schools).[79]

If the state scales back its public spending, arguing that doing so is an unavoidable necessity, for those decisions to comply with its international human rights law obligations, it must ensure that the policies adopted do not permanently and negatively affect fundamental rights, such as the right to food as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. It must also take measures to ensure that its policies do not negatively affect or discriminate against, groups to whom it owes additional human rights protections, such as women, children, or people with disabilities.

II. Austerity-Motivated Cuts to Welfare: A Political Choice or a Necessary Bitter Pill?

In the kitchen Mama’s

weeping chemical tears whilst

chopping bitter onion ends.

She’ll sauté them with mushrooms

(so small you could

swallow them like pills)

we bought for 10p three days ago

reduced to clear.

Last night we mixed water with

the milk to make it last,

and my mother went hungry

so she could watch me

grow

since she’d rather drink

endless cups of tea (black),

although she hates the taste, than see me with an empty

plate.

– An excerpt from Meredith LeMaître’s poem, “Yellow Stickers”[80]

As the global financial crisis hit starting in 2007, the UK’s budget deficit swiftly ballooned. The current budget deficit rose from £9bn in 2008, to £60.4bn in 2009 and exceeded £100bn in 2010.[81] A new coalition government elected in May 2010, began a policy program to address the sharp increase in national debt, and chose to achieve this primarily through reductions in state spending.[82]

Critics and proponents of the government’s fiscal contraction refer to this decision to reduce the deficit by focusing primarily on cutting state spending instead, for example by raising taxes, and the amalgam of resultant policy changes, as “austerity.” For this reason, we use the term to refer to this set of policy decisions motivated at least in part by a government’s objective of cutting the annual deficit.

Some politicians have presented fiscal contraction, or deficit reduction through spending cuts, and changes to the welfare state as an unavoidable necessity. George Osborne, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer (the senior UK minister responsible for finance and economy, and generally referred as “the Chancellor”), announced the 2010 budget as an emergency budget to address a large budget deficit and sovereign debt from the preceding government. He characterized it as “tough, but fair,” calling it “the unavoidable [b]udget.”[83] Chancellor Osborne was clear that the fiscal contraction would require cuts to welfare expenditure, saying:

It is simply not possible to deal with a budget deficit of this size without undertaking lasting reform of welfare.… Here in Britain, the explosion in welfare costs contributed to the growing structural budget deficit in the middle part of this decade.[84]

This view gained acceptance among some financial commentators in the UK, who referred to it as the “kill or cure budget”[85] and characterized the UK’s austerity program “as a necessary pill to swallow.”[86]

By contrast, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Professor Philip Alston, concluded at the end of an investigative visit to the UK in 2018 that even if austerity was unavoidable, the way the welfare system was cut and reshaped arose from political choices that resulted in greater poverty. Alston said the UK’s experience since 2010 “underscore[d] the conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so.”[87]

As set out in the sections below, human rights law requires these decisions to cut public expenditure to reduce deficits to meet a set of stringent tests in order to be lawful. Even where a state considers such cuts to be genuinely unavoidable, it cannot impose them with disregard for basic human rights, including the right of people to have sufficient food, as part of their right to an adequate standard of living.

Austerity and Policy Choices on Welfare Spending

In a landmark 2009 speech delivered to his Conservative Party setting out a vision for government, David Cameron, then leader of the opposition and soon to become Prime Minister, set out an agenda explicitly rejecting the previous Labour government’s “fiscal stimulus” response to the UK’s economic crisis. Cameron said at the time, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.... The age of austerity demands responsible politics. Over the next few years, we will have to take some incredibly tough decisions on taxation, spending, borrowing—things that really affect people’s lives.”[88] The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government elected in 2010, and subsequent Conservative governments annually reduced public sector net borrowing since 2010/11 both as a percentage of GDP and in real terms.[89] These reductions in borrowing have also led to reductions in spending.

Newspapers reported in October 2018 that current Prime Minister Theresa May said in a speech to the Conservative Party that the government had ended its austerity policies, nine years after the original vision was set out.[90] On closer reading, May said that easing austerity measures would be contingent on a favorable Brexit agreement, and subject to the annual “Spending Review” process in 2019 and future years.[91]

The extent to which austerity policies have in fact ended, or will end soon, is subject to debate. Independent analysis shows that if austerity programs, and in particular the significant contraction in welfare expenditure continue, the impact will continue to be severe (documented further below in this Chapter and Chapter III). Analysis by the Resolution Foundation, a UK thinktank focused on living standards of low- and middle-income families, shows that although a decision not to increase benefits for four years in line with inflation, announced in 2015 and expected to end in 2019 (see section below on freezes), the final year of the freeze remains to be implemented and its impact on low income families will likely be severe, as it comes on the back of the cumulative impact of the first three years.[92]

Reducing the public deficit can be a legitimate aim for state policy and may be genuinely unavoidable, and may, within certain circumstances, cut state expenditure. In carrying out such cuts to spending a state cannot, however, disregard its duty to protect people’s human rights.

Even where unavoidable, decisions taken in the context of fiscal contraction should not have a disproportionately negative impact on rights. States are required to assess their plans against their obligations under international human rights law.

The Chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) explained the correct approach in an open letter to governments at the height of the global financial crisis, explaining these principles:

… under the Covenant all States parties should avoid at all times taking decisions which might lead to the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights. Besides being contrary to their obligations under the Covenant, the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights by States parties to the Covenant can lead to social insecurity and political instability and have significant negative impacts.

… the Committee realizes that some adjustments in the implementation of some Covenant rights are at times inevitable. States parties, however, should not act in breach of their obligations under the Covenant.

In such cases, the Committee emphasizes that any proposed policy change or adjustment has to meet the following requirements: first, the policy must be a temporary measure covering only the period of crisis. Second, the policy must be necessary and proportionate, in the sense that the adoption of any other policy, or a failure to act, would be more detrimental to economic, social and cultural rights. Third, the policy must not be discriminatory and must comprise all possible measures, including tax measures, to support social transfers to mitigate inequalities that can grow in times of crisis and to ensure that the rights of the disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and groups are not disproportionately affected. Fourth, the policy must identify the minimum core content of rights or a social protection floor, as developed by the International Labour Organization, and ensure the protection of this core content at all times.[93]

According to an independent macroeconomic analysis commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), one of the UK’s national human rights institutions, and conducted by economists Jonathan Portes and Howard Reed, the brunt of the impact of government spending cuts has fallen on the country’s poorest citizens and residents.[94] Further analysis by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), an independent, charitable organization specializing in macroeconomic studies and econometrics, also commissioned by the EHRC, confirmed that welfare benefit recipients from groups they assessed as being at risk, such as people with disabilities, women, and children had been disproportionately affected by welfare and tax changes, and the shift towards welfare-to-work policies.[95]

The Impact on Children and Families of Reduced Welfare Spending

A Program of Disproportionate Cuts to Children and Family Welfare Spending

Low income families with children have been particularly hard hit by the decision to reduce welfare spending. The government’s own expenditure figures show the part of the welfare budget allocated to spending on children on families has seen disproportionate cuts since 2010, when compared against other areas of public expenditure.

Human Rights Watch analysis of Treasury and public expenditure data illustrates that public expenditure on welfare for children and families was almost cut in half, or about 44 percent of pre-2010 expenditures (see figure below). The cuts to the Family and Children component of Welfare were far more substantial in comparison to other cuts such as Defence (7 percent), Education (17 percent), Protection (23 percent).[96] No other cuts were as large a percentage of their budget as the cuts to assistance for children and families.

This suggests that rather than the argument being a straightforward one of cuts across the board dictated by austerity, in fact, the more significant cuts to welfare spending for “Family and Children” are the result of more complex decision making. The category that has seen the most drastic reductions is “Family and Children”. Two areas have not seen reductions at all. Still, the fact remains that “Family and Children” have been particularly hard.[97] These figures have been adjusted for inflation and population change.

Click to expand Image © 2019 Human Rights Watch

The data also show that, as a percentage of the overall Gross Domestic Product, the annual value of the UK’s economy, the proportion spent on the budget for Welfare for “Family and Children” has fallen to a half of its 2010 levels. Although the expenditure on Defense and Protection fell by similar percentages, proportionate to their 2010 position they fell less.

Taking into account changes in population, inflation and GDP growth, per person public spending on welfare for “Family and Children” has decreased from £403 in 2010 to £222 in 2018.[98]

The government’s latest statistics on childhood poverty, published in March 2019, showed that the number of children in even what it considers absolute poverty had increased by 200,000 in the previous calendar year to approximately 3.7 million children.[99]

Click to expand Image Source: Human Rights Watch analysis of HM Treasury (HMT) Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) data. © 2019 Human Rights Watch

A Program of Welfare Caps, Freezes and Limits

The last three successive governments have rolled out policies that introduce new maximum caps, freeze existing benefit levels, and reduce existing allowances for new applicants. Then-Chancellor Osborne stated the rationale for reducing welfare spending through freezes, limits and caps as part of moving the UK from being a “low-wage, high-tax, high-welfare society to a higher-wage, lower-tax, lower-welfare economy,” arguing that taxpayers should not have to fund welfare at existing levels, as doing so crowded out other areas of government spending.[100] In reality, each of these policy decisions has affected families with children—some with parents who work—adversely. Groups organizing food banks, and welfare advisors (as discussed further in Chapter II) point to low income, welfare benefit changes or reductions, and inadequate levels of support as reasons people rely on emergency food aid.

Benefit Caps for Unemployed Households

In 2013, the government introduced a new monetary limit, or “benefit cap”, on total welfare benefits payable to what the UK government calls “workless households,” i.e. those in which no one was in employment, as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and related regulations. The benefit cap, as initially introduced, limited benefits payable to households—i.e. couples (with or without children) or single-parents with children—to £500 per week or £26,000 per annum. No cap existed previously. The cap piloted in London from April 2013 and was introduced nationally from September of the same year.

The government argued for a cap on overall benefits because it believed that applying such a limit would incentivize people in “workless households” to return to work and reduced the burden on taxpayers. Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary at the time, summarized this logic in a statement that was widely quoted in subsequent parliamentary debates: “The benefit cap will restore fairness to the taxpayer and fairness to those who do the right thing on benefits.”[101] Lord Freud, one of the Ministers at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) at the time, explained the logic behind the cap in a subsequent debate in the House of Lords, as follows: “The aim of this policy is to achieve positive effects through changed attitudes to welfare, responsible life choices and strong work incentives.”[102]

The Children’s Society, a national children’s charity associated with the Church of England, warned at the time that the benefit cap would affect children disproportionately, based on its estimate that children were seven times more likely than adults to be affected by this cap.[103] It argued that “children should not be punished for the choices made by their parents”.[104]

The impact of the benefit cap on households with children and single-parent households was soon evident from the government’s own statistical analyses of its welfare data.[105] Of the 76,200 households which had had their benefits capped between 2013 and May 2016, 94 percent of households had children. Of these, two thirds were single-parent families and 78 percent of all families capped had at least one child under the age of five.[106]

Early litigation to challenge the legality and discriminatory aspects of the benefit cap were unsuccessful, although the judiciary made clear its discomfort with aspects of the cap’s logic. A case against the 2013 cap brought by three London based claimants, all of whom were single mothers among the first group of people affected, was unsuccessful before the High Court.[107] Although the court found that the imposition of the cap infringed the right to family life (Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights or ECHR), it ruled that the breach was proportionate and justified and therefore not a violation.[108] The court recognized “that the benefit cap has a disproportionate adverse impact on women,” but found that this potential indirect discrimination (engaging Article 14 of the ECHR) did not violate women’s right to be free from discrimination because it could be justified in a social security context, and was “ultimately a policy issue.”[109]

In one of the cases, the claimant was a single mother of four children, whose lawyers argued that the cap would leave each member of the family on £2.98 per day for living costs, including food, and utilities. Two of the claimants, both victims of domestic violence, appealed to the Court of Appeal and UK Supreme Court. The latter delivered judgment in March 2015, stating that the 2013 benefit cap breached the UK’s legal obligations to ensure children’s best interests under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, with one of the Justices ruling:

It cannot be in the best interests of the children affected by the cap to deprive them of the means of having adequate food, clothing, warmth and housing. Depriving children of (and therefore their mothers of the capacity to ensure that they have) these necessities of life are simply antithetical to the notion that first consideration has been given to their best interests.[110]

The Supreme Court also held that the cap did not amount to unlawful discrimination against children because the rights contained in that Convention have not been incorporated into UK domestic law. In short, the majority of the Supreme Court justices found that the cap breached the UK’s international duty to uphold the best interests of children living in the UK. Since it lacked the power to overturn the policy, the court could not do more than call on the government to review its scheme.[111]

The government ignored the Supreme Court’s recommendation, and instead proceeded to lower the benefit cap further in 2016 from the then existing rate of £500.[112] The new rate, in place since November 2016, for a two-adult couple, or a single-parent with children (regardless of how many) is £384.62 per week outside London, and £442.31 per week in greater London (weighted to factor in higher living costs).[113] For single-parent “workless households” outside London with multiple children, this represented a further 23 percent cut in the maximum available welfare benefits. For those in London, it represented an 11.5 percent reduction.

By February 2017, the anti-poverty organization, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, estimated that the benefit cap affected over 66,000 families, of whom 72.3 percent were single-parents and 20.7 percent were couples with children.[114] In addition to cuts, the real value of out-of-work benefits since 2013 has not kept pace with inflation. On average, by the government’s own 2016 figures, the benefit cap was forecast to reduce household benefits for affected families by £60 per week (or just over £3,000 per year).[115]

Evidence to date suggests that these changes have not had the expected impact on incentivizing (re-)entry to work. Research conducted by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a thinktank closely following the impact of the overhaul of the welfare system, as well as research commissioned by the EHRC and carried out by the NIESR, shows that many of those affected appear to be accepting or adjusting to their lower income, rather than moving into work (despite entry or re-entry to paid work being a key objective of current welfare changes) or moving into cheaper accommodation.[116] The UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial government department responsible for official statistics, has also examined and raised serious doubts about the validity of the causal link the DWP has sought to draw between the introduction of the benefit cap and claimants’ return to work.[117]

Further research and cases documented by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), show that, in addition to only having achieved a modest increase in return to work in its first year of operation (16 percent, as opposed to 11 percent had the cap not been imposed),[118] the benefits cap has caused severe hardship as families have cut back on essentials, “with consequences for children’s diets, health and educational opportunities.”[119]

In a letter to Human Rights Watch, the DWP’s Minister for Family Support, Housing and Child Maintenance, Will Quince, wrote that the benefit cap’s aims were to incentivize work, ensure fairness between taxpayers and welfare recipients, and to make fiscal savings, but that the government was aware that some people needed further protection. Quince noted that the government had made additional support available to people with disabilities, who required or provided care, or were vulnerable and in need of housing.[120]

The Four-Year Benefit Uprating “Freeze”

Alongside its decision to introduce a benefit cap to “workless households” in two phases, the government also announced in its 2015 budget that it would “freeze” most working-age benefit levels for four years starting in 2016.[121] This “freeze,” meant stopping the earlier policy to increase working-age benefits annually at 1 percent between 2013 and 2016 (at a rate below inflation, measured as CPI). Prior to 2013, these benefits generally tracked inflation. The four-year benefit uprating freeze, often referred to simply as the “benefit freeze”, was intended to reduce government spending; in its impact assessment proposing the freeze, the government reasoned that there would be “no cash losers as a result of this policy,” as households could “accept the changed benefit entitlement in the future or move into work.”[122] The government offered little evidence to support this assertion. It is not clear, however, how reducing the real value of a benefit would not lead to a cash loss for recipients (see also section below on rising food prices, and impact on low-income families).

The government proceeded with this measure, despite criticism and early warnings from specialist organizations. In 2015, Citizens Advice, the main UK network of free, independent benefit advice providers warned that the freeze’s impact would be felt hardest by those on low incomes as the policy in place at the time of capping benefits below the rate of inflation was already causing hardship for their service users; with inflation projected to rise (as it did), over two thirds of 200 advisers surveyed saying that their clients were by 2015 “in a worse position to cope with the impacts of a freeze, in comparison to circumstances in 2012.” [123] In the same report, Citizens Advice estimated that at least 40 percent of their clients likely to be affected by the first freeze had dependent children.[124]

The UK-based thinktank Resolution Foundation has developed an alarming projection of the impact of the benefits freeze on the income of families with working-age household members, and poorer households with children and single-parents in particular, if the current trends continue.[125] Their analysis estimates that the lowest three income deciles of couples with children stand to see an annual household income loss of £650 - £825 per year as a direct effect of benefit caps and associated freezes, and the bottom six income deciles of single-parents stand to lose approximately £580-770 in annual household income.[126]

The benefits such families receive is also worth less than previously. The same Resolution Foundation analysis of official data shows child benefit a family receives for the second child onwards to be worth 14 percent less in real terms by April 2019 than it was in 1979 when first introduced, following a steady decline commencing in 2009.[127]

Although HM Treasury and the DWP have confirmed separately, in writing, that the government does not intend to continue the “freeze” beyond 2020, Human Rights Watch considers that significant harm has already taken place for the poorest families’ ability to afford food, by the loss in the real value of welfare benefits since the beginning of the “freeze”.[128]

Regressive New Limits to Child Related Tax Benefits

One tax policy stands out as carrying particularly negative consequences for those on the lowest incomes, and as inherently discriminatory against children living in poverty—the post-2017 limit to the child tax credit that caps the credit at two children for low income families for children born after 2017. Tax credit is a means-tested benefit made up of various components, with varying value depending on an individual family’s circumstances. The implication is that a poor family that has more than two children will not receive any additional support in the form of tax credit for them.[129] This policy financially penalizes large numbers of children and their families and impacts negatively on children living in poorer households with a parent or parents who rely on welfare benefits. It also is a policy that punishes parents if they want to have more than two children, including through blending families (i.e. a family in which two parents have children from previous relationships, but bring them together to live as one household).

The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 and accompanying regulations introduced a two-child limit, meaning that no tax credit will be awarded for any child beyond the first two born after April 6, 2017, except in special circumstances (such as adopted children, multiple births, or children conceived as a result of rape).[130]

Lord Freud, then a minister in the Department for Work and Pensions explained the rationale simply: “The tax credits system has become too generous.… The average number of dependent children in families in the UK in 2012 was 1.7, so the Government feel that it is fair and proportionate to limit additional support provided by the taxpayer through child tax credit and the child element of Universal Credit to two children.”[131]

The policy faced criticism from specialist civil society organizations, thinktanks, and a coalition of religious leaders and parliamentarians, in its first year and a half of implementation but received less media attention than other welfare and tax changes which made their impact felt more immediately.

The End Child Poverty coalition has summarized this problem succinctly, saying:

The two-child limit has not attracted as much attention as other welfare reforms … even though its long-term impact will be greater in terms of both the number of families affected and the impact on poverty. Because it only currently applies to children born after April 2017, the impact of the two-child limit will be more gradual, with the full effects not being felt for at least a decade. Nor does it lead to a sudden fall in a family’s income.… Instead, families having a third or subsequent child will experience a tight squeeze on their finances, because they no longer qualify for additional support.[132]

An analysis by the Child Poverty Action Group and the Institute for Public Policy Research warned of the consequences for low income families with more than two children. These included disincentivizing single parents from creating “blended families” with a new partner and lost income of up to £2,780 per year for a family with a working parent if they have a third child.[133]

A similar study by the thinktank Policy in Practice warned that by 2020, 69,000 children would fall below the poverty line within a year as a result of the birth of a third or additional child in the household under this policy.[134] By June 2018, CPAG confirmed that 71,000 families had lost entitlement to child benefits as a result of the cap under the child tax credit (or the child-related portion of Universal Credit payments).[135]

In April 2018, one year after the two child limit was introduced, a group of sixty senior Church of England clerics, including 19 of the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords, and representatives of other Christian denominations as well as Muslim and Jewish faiths, began a public campaign calling on the government to rethink the policy.[136] The religious leaders published an open letter, saying that in addition to being a regressive measure that could have punitive effects on families as a result of factors out of their control (loss of employment, illness, etc.), the policy “conveys the regrettable message that some children matter less than others, depending on their place in the sibling birth order.”[137]

The Bishop of Durham, one of the Church of England’s representatives in Parliament, said, “It is simply not right that some children get support and others don’t. We share a moral responsibility to make sure that everyone in our country has a decent standard of living and the same chances in life, no matter who they are or where they come from.”

The policy has also been subject to a legal challenge brought by two single mothers and an unmarried couple responsible for the care of their child and one of their grandchildren. Part of the High Court’s April 2018 ruling (which found the two-child limit compatible with the ECHR) was appealed and judgment from the Court of Appeal remains pending.[138]

The policy as originally designed would have had more draconian effect than it does presently because it was drafted to apply retroactively to children born before the law came into force. However, in January 2019, the government announced a partial reversal of its two child limit policy.[139] The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, delivered a speech in which she accepted that it was unfair to apply the limit retrospectively to children born before April 2017 (when the policy came into force), but insisted that the policy remained fundamentally fair and would continue to apply to families which had grown beyond two children after that date.[140]

Turn2Us, a specialist welfare advice organization, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a UK thinktank analyzing welfare issues, expressed skepticism about the announced change, noting that while it addresses the retrospective aspect of children born before April 6, 2017, the fundamental policy remained in place and that its impact on poorer families with third children born after that date would not be felt fully for another decade.[141]

The Cumulative Impact of Changes to Welfare on Children and Families

On the front line, at welfare advice services and food banks, evidence of the cumulative impact of the welfare changes on families is plain to see.

Sarah Thacker, from Hull and East Riding Citizens Advice, one of the welfare advisors Human Rights Watch interviewed in that region, and who has over a decade and a half experience of casework in the area, said that her clients often arrive at a point of crisis. They may have experienced changes to benefits, problems with housing ranging from rent arrears to imminent eviction, domestic violence, or have mental health conditions. She explained how the impact of those pressures is felt and seen in food insecurity:

We refer clients to the food bank [emergency assistance] and food aid [ongoing free or low cost food such as community pantries and community centers]. Now we’re seeing families affected by the child benefit cap. I have client with a son who has a learning disability, who I help access food aid via a children’s center. They get their food from FareShare and she has a food parcel picked out for her. For others we show them the Goodwin Pantry, and we let them choose items for a free food parcel on their first visit, and then we either pay for a few weeks or help them budget for it. Paying £3 out of their pocket helps reduce the stigma attached. [142]

A community worker who runs projects from the Marfleet Community Centre in East Hull reported that she had referred “at least a hundred people” to sources of food aid of different kinds, ranging from Citizens’ Advice to get a food bank referral, community pantry and social supermarket initiatives, the local council for emergency help, and specific support services for women and families in situations of domestic violence. She discussed the stigma attached to asking for help, discussing some cases where she had referred people to food aid:

They would rather go without than ask for help, so it’s important not to make judgments out loud. I just say, oh I’m going to nip to EMS [the local social supermarket] or Goodwin [a community pantry] to get some veggies and see if they’ll come. There’s one single mum, she’s struggled through life, she works odd hours, but not regularly. One day she just broke down in tears when she was here and said she has no food in the cupboards, no toilet roll, and wasn’t entitled to any more benefits. She can’t get the 30 hours of work she needs to get by, so I helped her get registered with [the local social supermarket]. [143]

The cumulative impact of these benefit freezes, tax credit reductions and caps to welfare benefits reflect the twin punitive and motivational components of welfare policy directed towards people on low incomes. These changes, characterized by their proponents as “unavoidable” changes necessitated by austerity, are concrete political choices intended to scale back the welfare state, which has had the effect of plunging people further into poverty and vastly exacerbating food insecurity.

Rather than being a necessary, bitter pill, these are policy choices taken by political leaders to cut state financial support, and they have negatively affected the human rights of people on low incomes, in particular their right to an adequate standard of living, including their right to food. For women, children and people with disabilities, as set out in the legal chapter, these impacts may also be discriminatory.

III. Welfare Changes and Families on the Breadline

The UK welfare system has been scaled back significantly through funding cuts and reductions to welfare benefits since 2010. The poor implementation of many of these structural changes has exacerbated food insecurity. Wage stagnation and rising food prices have contributed to the problem as well, but changes to the social support and welfare benefits architecture are key factors.

Koldo Casla, Policy Director at Just Fair, one of the leading domestic human rights organizations working on economic and social rights, has argued post-2010 tax and welfare policies have amounted to “an unacceptable regression” in the human rights to social security and to an adequate standard of living.[144] Casla told Human Rights Watch, “We live in on