When lockdown began on 23 March, food supply became an issue that many people found themselves having to consider for the first time: what food do I have in the cupboard? How will I restock when supplies run low? What do I really need, and what can I do without?

For others however, these questions are already painfully familiar. People from specific groups long known to be vulnerable - the elderly, homeless, rough sleepers and asylum seekers barred from working to support themselves – experience food poverty as a consequence of their marginalisation by the state; and so do many others, including people in receipt of state benefits, people in precarious and low-waged employment, and their children.

Pre-Covid figures published by the Department for Communities indicated that in 2018/19, 24% of NI children – 107,000 boys and girls – were growing up in poverty. Alarmingly, this was a rise of 5% from 2017/18, when the reported figure was 19%. It should therefore be no surprise that hunger was a reality for many in our society long before Covid. At Christmas time 2019, in what now feels like a distant past, the charity Action for Children warned that more than 20,000 children under 10 years old - an average of two children in every primary class in Northern Ireland - were “facing Christmas without warmth or fresh food”. A representative of the group told the Belfast Telegraph:

“while some families will spend the Christmas holidays putting their children to bed early to keep warm because they can’t afford to heat the house, for others it has become the norm not to have a winter coat, to rely on foodbanks, or for their children to miss out on hot meals.”

At the same time, the Trussell Trust had just published its first annual report on food poverty State of Hunger: a study of poverty and food insecurity in the UK. The study found that during the 2016-2018 period, between 8 and 10% of UK households were food insecure, which it defined as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food”. The Trust’s food network, which covers around 60% of UK food banks, reported an exponential increase in need, with provision of three-day food parcels rising from 61,000 in 2010/11 to 1,583,000 in 2018/19. It estimated that up to 2% of UK households used a food bank in that year.

The statistics, as stark as they were, covered a multitude of devastating human stories: parents going hungry to feed their children; adults ashamed of needing to use food banks and trying to hide the family’s poverty from younger family members; children pretending they were not hungry in an attempt to protect their parents; and school staff struggling to teach pupils who arrive at school tired, distracted and disruptive from hunger.

Poverty is certainly not new to the UK; but the current, widespread and seemingly entrenched poverty is linked by experts to the impact of the 2008 recession and, even more significantly, to the austerity measures and related welfare reforms undertaken by successive Tory governments since that time. Specific drivers have been identified, chief among them the erosion of working age benefits, the minimum five-week wait for initial Universal Credit payments, and the benefit sanctions regime. In contrast, the response to rising levels of hunger, rather than happening at a state level, has been led by the community and charity sector around the UK.

The impact of Covid-19

Into this situation came Covid-19 and the lockdown. The Food Foundation reported that 16% of UK households experienced food insecurity when lockdown was first imposed. The Trussell Trust reported that as of end March 2020, use of its food banks was already nearly double what it was 12 months before. In May the Food Foundation noted some improvement, but indicated that levels of food insecurity in the preceding four weeks were “still almost 250% higher than pre-Covid-19 levels”.

The impact on NI households, as elsewhere, has been profound. As before, charities and community groups have done their utmost but need became so widespread that the state had to step in with official responses of its own.

Stormont’s responses

Food security and food poverty fall under the specific remit of the Food Standards Agency, an independent government department. In NI it co-chairs, with SafeFood, an All-Island Food Poverty Network to foster a “coordinated and strategic approach to tackling food poverty on the island of Ireland”.

Work on the poverty reduction indicator of NI’s Programme for Government falls under the responsibility of the Department for Communities, the department also responsible for housing and administering the Department of Work and Pension’s welfare reforms. Alongside rolling out Universal Credit and other elements of the UK-wide welfare reforms, from 2017 the Department had gained experience, for instance, in implementing a social supermarket pilot scheme for 1,000 people to combat food poverty.

When lockdown was announced, authorities took specific emergency measures around housing (protections from eviction; housing rough sleepers) and income support (schemes for 80% of earnings to workers; £20/week increases to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit recipients). Within that context, the Department for Communities also took targeted emergency measures to meet urgent food need, including:

Food basket scheme. This included weekly food parcels (mainly non-perishable goods) for elderly and other people advised to shield by their GP in need of support, or otherwise identified by Advice NI’s Community Helpline as in critical need of food. Recipients’ details were passed to NI’s five Health Trusts and/or the eleven local district councils to arrange delivery. The scheme was initially planned to extend to 10,400 food parcels, but the department found itself delivering far more; it later announced that its maximum supply capacity was for 18,000 food boxes per week. It also announced additional funds of £1.5m (first tranche) to district councils to help them ensure access to food for those most in need. The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs also announced £2.5m in funding for district councils, health trusts and community partners, to meet urgent need for food and for services in rural areas.

Free School Meals support for children in low-income families. Alongside the Department for Education, the Department for Communities announced biweekly free school meals payments amounting to £2.70 per day per child for each day their school was closed, to families of 97,000 children in receipt of free school meals during term time. The payments were issued in the same manner as uniform grants; families for whom no bank details were held were advised via text message to complete an online form on the Education Authority website. While the system of payments to households’ bank accounts, where possible, avoided the failings of the voucher scheme in England, internet access was a potential barrier for other families. Even before Covid, there was widespread evidence of holiday food poverty amongst families with school-age children; the Children’s Commissioner for England has flagged this as a real danger for 1.3 million English school children in 2020

Stormont’s Minister for Education has announced that his department cannot afford the fortnightly £27 per pupil pay-out over the summer.

Nonetheless, Stormont’s Minister for Education has announced that his department cannot afford the fortnightly £27 per pupil pay-out over the summer.

Recommendations for emergency response

In terms of emergency response going forward, key recommendations for the authorities include:

• the Department for Communities to extend the schemes for food baskets for the elderly and others who have been shielding
• the Department for Education to reverse its decision to not provide free school meals for children in low income households into the coming months, at least as long as lockdown and social distancing measures are in place
• the Department for Communities to take additional steps to ensure the food security of additional groups known to be vulnerable to food poverty, including
• rough sleepers and other homeless who have been benefitting from extra measures to find shelter for them during the lockdown period.
• asylum-seekers and refused asylum seekers, who have long been flagged as a group that is particularly at risk of food poverty due to hostile environment and No Recourse to Public Funds conditions

Recommendations for changes to existing programmes to combat food poverty

The London Child Poverty Alliance (including the Child Poverty Action Group, Just Fair, Shelter and others) have recommended a series of measures to combat households’ food poverty during the pandemic. Many of these overlap with recommendations by Sustain (the Alliance for Better Food and Farming), Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Trussell Trust and others around food poverty; they also reinforce recommendations made by advocates working in the areas of housing and income support.

These recommendations include, amongst others, raising child benefit payments, making Universal Credit advances non-repayable grants and increaing Child Tax credit by £20.week, raising Local Housing Allowance rates to 50% the average rental cost and removing the No Recourse to Public Funds condition.

Longer term recommendations to combat food poverty

For its part, the Food Foundation has also called on the government

• to urgently instate regular measurement of food insecurity
• to research who and why certain groups are affected and how food insecurity impacts food choices and health
• to use that research to inform long term policy initiatives to tackle the problem