Hunger in the United Kingdom

[1] In the run-up to the 2015 general election, the issue of hunger in the UK became somewhat politicised, with right wing commentators expressing scepticism about figures presented by church groups and left-leaning activists.

In a 2016 report, the All-Party group stated it is not possible to accurately quantify the number of people suffering from hunger in the UK, and called for better collection of data.

August 2020 saw the United Nations agency UNICEF begin funding charities helping to feed hungry UK children for the first time in its history.

Regression analysis published by Oxford University in 2015 found that it is largely need and not simply awareness of foodbanks that is causing the growth in usage.

Official figures published in November 2016 indicated that the number of hospital beds assigned to folk suffering from malnutrition had nearly tripled in the last decade.

In 2018, both the Child Poverty Action Group and the charity Feeding Britain estimated that three million UK children were at risk of going hungry during school holidays.

[27] In August 2020, for the first time in its history, UNICEF began funding charities working to feed British children, distributing over £700,000 to various UK NGOs.

[4] For example, in December 2012, Trussell Trust chairman Chris Mould spoke out against the coalition's welfare reforms, accusing the UK government of lacking empathy for those faced with poverty and hunger.

[35] A spokeswoman for Trussell responded by suggesting that while low earners in the UK avoid starvation most of the time, they can face periods of severe hunger when hit by personal crisis, which for economically vulnerable people can be something as simple as a spell of cold weather, forcing them to choose between staying warm or going hungry.

[38][39] In 2016, the All-Party MP group on hunger called for an end to political fighting over the issue, to avoid the risk of undermining public support.

[40] Even as early as the 19th century this view was challenged, with medical historians such as Charles Creighton arguing that the effect of hunger in checking population growth was roughly equivalent on both Britain and continental Europe.

[42] Creighton does, however, write that sometimes a generation or more would go by between famines, and that evidence suggests that in normal times, the standard of living was higher for peasants in Britain compared with their counterparts on the continent.

[44] Improvements in agricultural technology, transportation, and the wider economy meant that for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, severe hunger receded as a problem within the United Kingdom.

With a relatively generous and inclusive welfare state established after the war, and with food prices often falling in real terms, hunger within the UK was no longer a pressing problem for the second half of the 20th century.

For the first couple of years after the crisis, the rise in hunger was checked in part by the UK government's fiscal stimulus, which boosted public spending to head off the threat of depression.

[51] In October 2012, as part of the BBC documentary Britain's hidden hunger, director David Modell highlighted the way in which internet-based loan providers can also cause people to go hungry.

[53] In February 2013, Olivier De Schutter, a senior UN official warned the UK's government against leaving too much responsibility for aiding Britain's hungry to the voluntary sector.

Also in December, a group of doctors and academics wrote to the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal, noting recent developments such as a doubling in the number of malnutrition cases received by hospitals, and asserting that hunger in the UK had reached the level of a "public health emergency".

[64] Also in February, a cross denominational group of bishops and other church leaders criticised the UK government's welfare reforms for worsening the hunger crisis.

[65][66] Just prior to the release of the all-party parliamentary report in December 2014, archbishop Justin Welby stated that hunger "stalks large parts of the country" and that it shocked him more than the suffering he witnessed in Africa because in the UK it was so unexpected.

The report also stated that in contrast to the first few decades after World War II, poor people's incomes stopped rising in line with increased costs for housing, utility bills and food.

[73] "The way the UK government has handled its reduction in welfare spending has left parents unable to feed their children in the fifth-largest economy in the world.

[74] In June 2023, The Trussell Trust that owns more than 1,200 food banks in the UK estimated 11.3 million people faced hunger over the course of one year.

In an indicator looking at overall progress to "end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition", the UK was the 8th worst performer out of 41 high income countries.

[77] Liberal economists, such as Adam Smith, took the view that government intervention would be counterproductive; that in the long run only the free market could produce sustained plenty for all.

Until the early 1830s, Lord Pitt and others who favoured government intervention largely retained control over policy, even if they had to compromise with those who opposed generous relief measures.

Karl Polanyi writes that the reason for the broad support was that the leading form of aid in the early 19th century, the Speenhamland system had become detested even by the working class themselves.

Polyanyi records that apart from a few aristocrats whose continued support of Speenhamland could be dismissed as self-interested (the system helped workers pay high prices for food from the agricultural lands they controlled), the only well known Briton to remain prominently opposed to the free market in the early 1830s was the socialist Robert Owen.

Vernon writes that by the 1840s, new journalistic techniques were beginning to make emotive appeals to readers which drove home the pain experienced by those suffering from severe hunger.

"[78][79] On the other hand, free-market supporters had campaigned against the Corn Laws – measures which protected mostly upper-class landlords against competition from cheaper foreign imports, but which made food more expensive, contributing to the famine in Ireland.