The rise of food charity has enabled a retreat of the state from food rights and welfare. Charity provision can be classified as a ‘successful failure’, it fails to address food poverty but continues to expand. The old concept of ‘less eligibility’ is updated for the times we live in.
Martin is Emeritus Professor of Food and Health Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. He originally trained as an environmental health officer in Dublin. After working in the north west of Ireland he developed an interest in the public health and health promotion aspects of the work. He spent some time working in the Irish and the English health services managing health promotion and public health services respectively. He has written on the rise of food banks and the subsequent withdrawal of the state from food welfare policies. See https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/martin-caraher
Uh thank you that’s great and and it’s I’m sorry I can’t be there in person um just proved impossible um that’s my details um I’m going to talk about food policy in a broad brush stroke way um I suppose one of the things I wanted to just say about this morning nothing
We’ve talked about this morning seems to preclude us pursuing government to meet its commitment to its citizens despite you know we can still continue to deliver services at a local level but we’ve got to continue I think to push for government to deliver its values um well maybe not to deliver its values
Because that we we would end up with a sella Braverman approach but to to meet its commitments I want to address three things household debt I want to address values related to food poverty and look at the concept of less eligibility which is still PR pretty large in the
Literature and I’ll talk about that I’m going to start with putting my values on the table and I’m going to just give you some quotes which I think clearly set out my values so the first one is from Tom Melo who those of you don’t know
He’s in a band called Rage Against the Machine but he’s also a social activist and he has got um a number of of um songs and um albums about this and he talks about Hunger being a crime and he says you know population’s in hunger this is a crime which somebody should be
Held accountable for the second one is from um s s rabini a Lebanese um composure political activist who says I’m not a heathen I’m not a heathen but hunger is Heathen and you can read the rest of that quote later on um and I think this is clear that you know hunger
Is in in a sense not a choice people make it’s it’s imposed on people Mar with you Martin you’re muted we can’t hear now can you see can you hear yeah sorry I don’t know what happened it’s it’s automat so I’m going to set my values on
The table which are um come from these two people um one is Tom Melo who’s hunger who is a social activice and is in a band called Rage Against the Machine and he says hunger is a crime and the second one comes from zahed rabini who’s a Lebanese composer and he
Says I’m not a heathen I’m not a heathen but hunger is Heathen and he goes on to say you know in a sense these are self-imposed but we should be looking for people for governments to tackle these issues the next one comes from Haley Squires who was the star of the film I
Daniel Blake which was set in a in Newcastle and she at one stage in the film is opening a tin of cold beans eating from them cuz she’s so ravenously hungry but in an interview she says why are you talking about food banks existing if you don’t talk about why
They exist it’s like pouring water into a boat that’s leaking there’s no point in me giving the information about what we need to do to help while you’re not talking about the root cause of it and that in some senses is where I’m going to go about the root causes and here’s
The star of a film who says herself she’s no expert on food insecurity but putting her finger on the trigger here and Olivia the shooter whose recent report he was the special rapor on food he said this in 2013 food assistance in the form of the right to Social Security such as cash
Transfer food stamps vouches can be defined in terms of Rights whereas food banks and Char are charity based and depend on donations and Goodwill they can also be a sense of Shame attached to food banks now Olivia theit has just done a report in his new role as the un
Special rapor on Extreme poverty criticizing the UK for its for its lack of activity on Extreme poverty and the last quote this is from um Yates um in a in a play he wrote in 1892 he said it’s time that poverty should Bolt the door this was written in
The wake of the Irish famine and he goes on to say if we knew how to find the deserving poor we do our share we know the evil of M charity so my stance is that charity is not a solution that’s not the rule out self-help and all the
Good works we’ve been talking about this morning but there is a there’s a focus here on welfare and Welfare policies and we talked about this in a in a piece we’ve done in the bmj but this K Katherine Smith talks about this in her book beyond evidence-based policy and
Public health it’s often about the interplay of ideas and when we’re talking when Emma was talking about influencing politicians it’s very often the ideas not the evidence per se that’s lacking we’re very poor in public health of putting across ideas and Concepts that people can latch on
To and an example of this is I mean the national food strategy which the government had just kicked into touch a couple of months ago was written by Henry dimbleby but he talks about an evidence to the environment food and Rural Affairs Committee in 2021 that he
Excluded food poverty because it says it it had become politically polarizing he says and he says he can’t revisit it so in the national food strategy there was very little on food poverty I mean Henry went on to say he to it was been covered
In other areas but the link is there to the to his evidence on camera about this and to this is just reiter some of the things I said this morning and conversations that this comes from medy Power about Hunger whiteness and religion and Neo looking at food banks
And food charities in a broader sense and how there are inbuilt issues about whiteness and religion in neoliberal Britain why have we got food banks which are lot half of which are largely religious based delivering food which is a right not a charity um and you know we’ve heard all
This I’m not going to you can read that but everybody the food Foundation JF round Tre are all are all looking at Food insecurity and how the numbers have increased this is a massive problem it’s a massive problem from a health perspective not just for Hunger but for
Obesity because we know that those who go hungry are pretty much the same group largely who are obese in later life for various complicated Reasons I’m not going to get into now but there’s a health cost coming later on if we don’t solve this issue so if you think about
Food spending in the last year 2022 UK households spent 1.1 billion more on food than in December 2021 but the volume of sales was down by 1% and there was a huge shift to ultra processed foods so foods that have a long shelf life and sit on the Shelf I
Mean there’s a good reason why people buy these Foods they don’t buy fruit and veg because they’re they’re eaten at the the beginning of the week and then they have very little at the end of the week so they buy Ultra processed foods which sit on the
Shelves the rise and food spending is accounted for largely by food inflation 20% the um one of the chief not the um one of the directors of associated British Foods this morning is saying food inflation will end by the middle of next year the retailers are not saying
That they are saying food inflation will continue for the next 18 months the bank of England in the run up to Christmas 2022 credit card borrowing row with many households using credit to finance their Christmas purchases including food now these are people and groups and families who are probably on insecure incomes if
They’re working um they’re they’re in the gig economy so they’re really they’re not even clear what money will come in next week so what traditionally what they do is they use credit card Bor borrowing to tide them over to the next paycheck and savings have during lockdown were
Used and Gone on by among lowincome groups they had only had an average of200 in savings lockdown wrote that savings off and that people have not recovered since that so part of this and part of the issues about food security are precarity of income and employment people don’t know if they’re going to
Have work next week and they don’t know if they’re going to have an income next week so they can’t plan for food this is part of a longer a long a bigger overview probably um there’s an inequality in income sorry that should be income and wealth is rising every
Year four in every 10 pounds of wealth goes to the richest 10% while one pound in every 10 goes to the bottom 50% we have a hugely unequal society and the top groups Escape top rate taxes by investing in wealth not in income I mean the issue is not income the issue is
Actually we real average pay is no higher than in June 2026 it equates back to pre the latter 2008 financial crisis food inflation is running wild and above average inflation across the food chain we’re seeing the supermarkets fight back with reduction in prices at the moment
But that reduction in prices comes at a cost of farmers and producers so there’s a new milk War entered into at the moment that will essentially if they hold to the reduction in food prices in milk it will wipe out Dairy farming in the UK all the
Supermarkets will do is import it from Eastern Europe and food and I quote from Liz this is um Liz’s term the elastic item in the household budget especially of the poorest 20% you can cut back on on food but you can’t cut back on other outgoings such as rent travel insurance Etc
Etc is this new not really we’ve seen similar crisis in 2000 2008 I mean there’s a feeling that actually what happens over the years the food poverty is rediscovered um but every 10 years is a cycle of the government whatever whichever government is in power rediscovering but very
Little done about it I think what’s different now is we’re P facing a Perma crisis with be the war in Ukraine the current crisis in the Middle East which is going to raise uh oil to 175 pounds a barrel which is going to massively impact on our food and food
Costs and there’s a continuous poverty premium for those on low incomes who pay a greater percentage of their incomes on food I mean they spend considerably less in absolute terms than those in high incomes but relatively more um of their income on food and that’s not a healthy basket if they’re going to
Afford if they were going to try to eat a healthy basket as Emma says they probably couldn’t afford it the reflation rate as I said is of food basic food items is above that of General inflation this just shows you some of it what’s happened in the from up to September
2022 so vegetable oil past the basics tea went up some things didn’t go up like instant coffee sausages and some of the things down at the bottom but the and this raises issues and again I put some of this in the chat where um the there’s talk about looking at a typical
Basket and a healthy basket and comparing the difference between the two and a typical basket is not necessarily a healthy basket but it’s done by people on it’s it’s good household management by people on low incomes to manage until the end of the month this goes back to my issue about
Food in about inse Security Financial insecurity one in seven people more than 7 million are financially excluded and you can link on the link down here and this gives you an interactive map and it overlayers pretty much with food insecurity I mean it they’re not complete overlays but you go back to
Financially excluded people are those that are more likely to be food insecure and this is going to Bank of England are predicting Financial ex exclusion will rise in the next year um the TU have said family debt has increased I mean the average household debt has gone up to 20,000 post
Pandemic and this is from this is from the um the Bakers food and Allied Workers Union and these are people who in contact with food and people who are in contact with food have not eaten enough off due to a lack of money or that one in five said they ran out of
Food and 35% um ate less to ensure others in the household had enough to eat and usually that’s mothers of course so there are wider impacts to food insecurity but the point about this is this is people who are work with food and in contact with food and are suffering food insecurity
And we find similar stuff even across people who work in supermarkets so debt I want to I’m I’m obsessed by debt household debt at the moment some of these have um brigh house have shut up shop these were um essentially you bought Goods white goods on the Never
Never um and you paid them off but Bright House went into debt went into um Administration but they sold off their debts so people are still knocking on the doors of people who took out loans and anyway we’ve written about this so this was brigh house leased out on a
Loans basis furniture and white goods you bought your Telly off them not only did you buy the Telly and pay for it weekly by week but you had to pay for your subscription service every time you turned it on it was a bit like in the N
Some of you are too young the 1970s you got a slot at the back of your Telly and you put in 10 PS to connect to to the channels in the first lockdown in 21 million customer accounts were frozen with credit cards these were considered people on low incomes with bad debts and
There were poor risks so they lost access to food because credit was frozen for them um because you know we were ordering online if you didn’t have a credit card how could you order online so they took out loans from these people I’ve just put up previously from a lot
Of these people from Wanga etc etc um and The Provident with 4 million customers the provy man was a doorstep loans company charging up to 2,000% on loans and Amigo with two million customers was likewise and this is hidden from us I mean most of this comes from the bank of
England data who are really really concerned about this but the point is people manage not everybody who goes not every body who food insecure goes to ends up going to a food bank some manage and cope from one paycheck or one income to another or rely on Community
Resources and during lockdown and post lockdown some of these resources have been shut to them um they like access to credit cards so a lot of these provent and Amigo went into Administration that doesn’t mean people were released from their debts their debts were sold on so people come
Knocking at the door saying okay you you’ve got um you have a loan of £1,000 you now owe us £2,000 um sorry that should be for the Miss selling of a 10 of a 12,000 of a1200 pound loan people who took out a loan will get between four And1 but
Still have to pay off the 1,200 loans and of course these practices encourage households to take out loans to pay off the loans so it’s a vicious circle Amigo ask for a guarantor for the loan which preferably was a family member so they become liable for the loan so there’s a
Real Vicious Circle going on and both of these who are formally recognized were formally Provident in Amigo charge High interest rate 49% per anom I wish I was getting on my savings so three main points emerge without access to credit cards many were further isolated and couldn’t order food online the pmic and
The loss of jobs and income among section resulted in more doorstop loans been taken out and that still continues I mean the latest data from the bank of England says that’s not ended and none of this includes the illegal or informal loan system where Loan Sharks come and
Give you I mean the the 49% is a would be a joy for for the in for these people because these charge up to 2,000% um or they break your arm if you don’t pay so all of this has consequences for food purchasing beyond the actual issue
Of just going into this the retail shop and getting it the latest data shows Pawn the use of Pawn Brokers is increased by 60% and now the big issue is the all-in-one shopping apps the claron app is the biggest one of these buy now pay later with 60% of
People taking a buy now pay later um apps ending up indebted and people coming knocking the door saying you are now bankrupt and you need to pay us off so this is hidden you can link the story the link to the story in the guardian is
There you can look at it later so I’m coming to the concept of less eligibility and this is you know an old concept from the 1840s when Public Health was set up um to deal with lots of um impoverished people the principle less eligibility people on welfare
Should not benefit more than the lowest rate wage earner and that’s still holds true and I’ve got a number of examples here I’m not going to go through all of them but Michael go said they’ve only got themselves to blame for making bad decisions families are unable to manage their finances
That’s why they end up at food banks I mean Liz will remember this lady on the morning of the APG report on food on food banks lady Jenkins one of the members of the group said well we’ve lost a lot of it’s all about cookery skills people need to know how to cook
I’ve had a large bowl of porridge today cost 4 p a large bowl of sugary cereal cost you 5 25p missing the point okay let me skip to the next one Lee 30p Anderson most of you will be familiar with you know he says we can make a meal
For 30p a day the point about this these are influential people Lee Anderson is one of the Deputy chairs of the conser ative party not the only one people say he’s D chair he’s one one of the four or five Deputy chairs Brendan Smith conservative MP say saying the same
About firefighters earning 32,000 pounds a year the point of the story was they can’t afford to live in the areas they’re working so they commute in so that 30,000 doesn’t cover all the commuting costs but his solution to should learn how the budget and prioritize and this is a recent one from
The recent hamor B where the Tory byelection candidate suggest the families should F off if they could afford TVs and phones I mean luckily he didn’t get voted in but the point about those is these These are common perceptions around people on food poverty and they happen all the time
Every time I go to an appg people just say well isn’t it just because they can’t cook or they’re improvident or they don’t know how to do this or they’re just buying phones and TVs I mean it it’s a really worrying narrative I think we’ve got to get across we’ve
Already mentioned Scotland and the right to food and there’s lots of good things happening in Scotland including an exit planned for food banks part of the strategy is there will be no new food banks opening and people will be able to afford um a healthy a healthy
Diet there’s a number of gaps they haven’t appointed someone to oversee this yet the new Scottish government so we’re still waiting for that to happen Michael Marmet this goes back to my opening points when the society is flourishing Health tends to flourish when a society has larger social economic inequalities there are larger
Inequalities in health one of which is food insecurity and food poverty others include mental health greater chronic diseases Etc the health of the population is not just a matter of how well the health services funded and function important as that is health is closely linked to the conditions in which people
Are born grown live work and inequities in power money and resources the social determinance of health so I think there’s a need to look wider um at in terms of values of the social determinants of health and you know this is one way of Distributing equality and Equity equality is everybody has access
To the bike Equity means that bike is adapted for people’s individual uses maybe we need to think about an exit strategy for food banks and food charities in that terms for local communities as in stevenage you know local Solutions often don’t translate into National Solutions they’re good at local at local issues
The context is let’s put this in context there a global food insecurity crisis this is you know many millions of people are going hungry today as we speak um 20 million including 12 million children Western central Africa could be acutely malnourished by the end of the year the current war in Ukraine has
Meant that you know there’s a significant proportion of world ukrain not going through countries that it should go to um the current war in the middle the current situation in the Middle East is going to have similar issues for us which we haven’t even begun to think about one of which is the
The as I said earlier the increase in the price of oil and this is of course you know this is what we spend we spend on average that’s gone up slightly but the United Kingdom is after the us we spend so little on food compared to some countries such as
Nigeria so food costs are going to impact much more down here um globally I do we need to bear that in mind we’ve been talking about this for X number of years too long this is something i’ done in Belfast back in 202 12 but we brought communities together
On the fge road um ironically so we brought Nationalist and unionist communities together to talk about food poverty um and city council have been doing things since but so it is possible and food can become a uniting element for many things I’m skip okay I’m sort of on my rundown now
Next two or three minutes I personally I don’t think charity or W food is not an answer I mean leftover food for leftover people is one of the comments austerity and social welfare changes are driving up poverty levels this is absolutely clear changes in the welfare system are
Been used to punish people whether that be Universal Credit or the way in which people are um assessed for Universal Credit human right to food needs to be highlighted I mean the UK is a signatory to a number of declarations we we should be holding them to account Maybe we
Should do what they’ve done in other countries with the right to food we actually take the government to court that’s one that’s what’s happened in India and South Africa we need to tackle poverty Employment Practices minimum income levels linked to food prices it’s em as earlier point we need to have a
Standard below which people cannot fall actually the standard should be how can people rise above that it shouldn’t be up based on a minimum level success is not a measure Ed by the opening of new food banks but by a guarantee of minimum income I would suggest and
There’s a cast as I say in medium in medium Health outcomes on Obesity and mental health so we could and should be using the lobby of the food bank and with more General charity movement I’m not but Lobby for what we heard from em the challenges earlier on um I remain less
Convinced that there’s that level of consensus at a local level going in and out of many food banks I do see some pretty rby practices and I think public opinion may not be as positive as we assume as we assume a recent example from the UK is the general population for support and
Cuts and foreign aid which is going to have a massive impact on Global Food insecurity but UK citizens have massively supported this they think it’s good it’s been sold to them um I would say without much detail so use protecting so we should use existing protection measures School
Meals Healthy Start but extend the packages they they are classically ways of dealing with um food insecurity their rights not charity um and maybe we should look at other countries what they for example what they do in Brazil so food charities in Brazil receive funding from government but have to meet certain
Standards in terms of procurement and nutrition standards we should extend welfare and wage provision to cover the cost of food go back to ‘s point but also government need to control food prices other countries have done it Greece Italy Spain have controlled basic goods and we need to reintroduce food control to
Benefit young people families um and food growing and production you know where our farming Community a lot of our farming Community live in food poverty um despite being having access and direct access to food and we need to reinvigorate local public health one of the crisis that happened during lockdown
Was public health been so decimated over the years that it wasn’t in a position to respond and it couldn’t work with food banks because the staff weren’t there to do that okay the rest of it um I think you can look at my finishing position it
Comes from a guy called Mark Winnie who must seriously examine the role of food banking he’s a us um activist which requires that we no longer praise its growth as a sign of generosity and charity but instead recognize it as a symbol of a society’s failure not the food bank’s failure but society’s
Failure to hold government accountable for hunger food insecurity and poverty um and this comes from Joel Berg again another us academic where he says sorry activist he runs a number of um modified food banks in the US the world should not follow the failed us system of fighting domestic hunger okay I’m
Going to stop there and time’s nearly up and maybe some questions okay