Benefits cuts and freezes has resulted in the poorest households in the UK being forced to skip meals because they can’t afford to put food on the table.
Damning new research by the End Hunger UK coalition of charities has revealed rising food prices and austerity are driving “hidden hunger” in Britain, with a third of the UK’s poorest households skipping meals because they cannot afford to buy food.
More than half of adults across all income groups, ages and household sizes agreed that they had seen the cost of their groceries go up over the past three months, reflecting rising food inflation.
Unemployed people were most at risk, with 36 per cent saying they had skipped meals, compared with 12 per cent of those in work.
Almost a third (31 per cent) were worried about having insufficient food and a quarter said they had gone 24 hours without eating at some point over the past 12 months.
Emma Lewell-Buck, the Labour MP for South Shields, whose food insecurity bill gets its second reading on Friday, said: “Without a robust system of household food insecurity measurement in place, making policy to mitigate hunger will never become a reality.”
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