Hunger pain for children facing scourge of poverty
IN THE decade of austerity that has followed the global financial crisis, the poorest families in the UK have been hit hard.
Childhood poverty is now at its highest level since 2009/10, with four million children classed as living in relative poverty. Two thirds of these children live in households where one parent is in work. And this trend shows no signs of slowing down. According to a recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this figure will rise to over five million, or 36.6 per cent of children, by 2020.
Families in Yorkshire have been among the hardest hit with some communities in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Halifax, Driffield, Grimsby and Hull where almost half of children are living in poverty.
The effects on children’s education and health are devastating. Put bluntly, the poorer you are the earlier you will die. You are more likely to die in your first year of life and during your lifetime you are more likely to experience asthma, poor mental health and preventable dietrelated diseases.
But one of the more disturbing elements of child poverty is that children in the UK, the fifth-richest country in the world, are going hungry. An increasing number of reports tell of children skipping meals, having to eat out-of-date food, rifling through rubbish bins and showing signs of malnourishment after the school holidays. Across Yorkshire, we have seen schools and community organisations opening breakfast clubs, school meals programmes in the holidays, community kitchens and other provisions to help families who are struggling to make ends meet. Since 2015,
has been reporting on the increasing number of food banks and the scale of child hunger across our communities in Yorkshire.
However, while evidence suggests that an increasing number of children are going hungry, the nature, extent and effects of child hunger are poorly understood. One of the issues with understanding child hunger in high-income countries is that hunger can be highly subjective and self-reported measures are not reliable.
A child may report going to bed hungry on a number of nights in the week, but this may be because they have refused to eat the nutritious meal that has been prepared for them. Because of the difficulties in assessing child hunger, many countries have turned to a more effective measure: food insecurity.
Food insecurity is complex but essentially it refers to ‘the inability to acquire or consume an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so’.
While consuming very out-of-date food or scavenging through rubbish may prevent children from going hungry, it is not tolerable in a high-income country such as the UK. Food insecurity therefore comprises elements of quantity, and quality, of food along with certainty and social acceptability of supply.
In the UK, much of the data on household food insecurity is estimated, but there remains “a lack of comprehensive data on food security”. While other countries routinely collect data on household food insecurity, we do not.
Measuring household food insecurity would allow us to record the effects of policy on the ability of households to meet basic food requirements and would also help us to predict the impact of future policy more effectively. However, more needs to be done to assess how food insecurity relates to children and young people. We cannot assume that we know how household resources are distributed between family members or that we know the strategies that children and young people employ to try to alleviate hunger.
This week sees the launch of a Parliamentary inquiry into child food insecurity which will hear directly from children and young people about their experiences of hunger and gather evidence to provide the first national measurement of child food insecurity in the UK.
This is the first national project which will focus specifically on food poverty as it relates to children and young people and which engages them directly in designing policy solutions to the issue of child hunger. Children across the UK will be invited to submit online evidence via Leeds Beckett University from January 2018 and intensive work with groups of children and young people will commence in all four countries in June 2018.
This research is being led by a partnership of policy analysts, youth workers, advocacy organisations and academics at Leeds Beckett University. Leeds Beckett began working with children from local schools earlier this month to consult with them on the proposals being put to MPs.
The evidence that we already have paints a very bleak picture indeed. With over a third of children predicted to be living in poverty by 2020, we should expect to hear more reports of children facing hunger and malnourishment and a rise in the prevalence of poverty-related diseases and chronic conditions. It is crucial that we begin to tackle this issue and that we involve children and young people in discussions about how we address food poverty in both the short and long term.