Chronic hunger has affected a sizable proportion of the UK's population throughout its history. Following improved economic conditions that followed World War II, hunger became a less pressing issue. Yet since the 2007–2008 world food price crisis that began in late 2006 and especially since the Great Recession, long term hunger began to return as a prominent social problem. Albeit only affecting a small minority of the UK's population, by December 2013, according to a group of doctors and academics writing in the British Medical Journal, hunger in the UK had reached the level of a "public health emergency". 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. An All-Party MP group focusing on hunger in the UK has called for activists to be cautious in how they discuss the problem of domestic hunger, as exaggerated claims and political point scoring risk reducing public support for tackling the issue. 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. The UK government began the official measurement of food insecurity in 2019, The first report was published on 16 December 2021. Hunger in the UK was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic with some food banks reporting that demand had more than doubled. August 2020 saw the United Nations agency UNICEF begin funding charities helping to feed hungry UK children for the first time in its history.
Current issues
Size and growth of the problem Since about 2012, the return of hunger to the UK has featured prominently in British media. Despite the extensive coverage, as of 2016 it was still not possible to determine exactly how many people in the UK were experiencing chronic hunger due to insufficient data. Numerous reports, studies and estimates have been published however, with many but not all suggesting that for some sub sections of the population, the problem may have been growing worse since the 2008 financial crises. Research published by the OECD in 2014 had indicated hunger in the UK may be decreasing. The number of people answering yes to the question 'Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?' decreased from 9.8% in 2007 to 8.1% in 2012. According to a 2016 report by The Food foundation based on a telephone survey of 1,000 people, over eight million Britons experienced either moderate or severe food insecurity in 2014; over four million faced severe food insecurity. The report was based on UN data; in February 2019 the Guardian reported it remains the best recent estimate of the extent of hunger in the UK. Due to the relatively small survey size, however, its results should be considered indicative rather than definitive. Also, facing even severe food insecurity doesn't necessarily mean one is experiencing chronic hunger. The rapid rise in the number of UK food banks since 2009 has often been used as evidence of growing hunger. Critics have argued that the rising food bank use does not prove this; it could just mean unscrupulous people are becoming more aware of food banks, and using their services not to save themselves from hunger, but to have more money free to spend on luxuries. 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. However the academics conducting the research agree that foodbank usage is not the best measure of hunger, saying that studies in other countries have suggested that most people suffering from food poverty don't use food banks. Further indications of rising hunger include a growing number of infants and pregnant mothers suffering from anaemia; an increasing number of people diagnosed with malnutrition in UK hospitals; a rising number of children starting their first and primary year of primary school underweight. In 2015 for example, 6,367 children started reception class underweight, which is up 16% on 2012 figures. 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. Again though there is a need for caution on the extent to which such figures really reflect a rise in hunger – an NHS spokesperson said the rise may be partly explained by the health service getting better at identifying malnutrition. Malnutrition has been found to affect three quarters of women aged 16–49 indicated by them having less folic acid than the WHO recommended levels. The UK government began collecting data related to hunger in the UK in 2019, with the first public reporting of this data due in March 2021. The 2020 UK COVID-19 outbreak and its associated lockdown had a "devastating impact" on people's ability to get needed food, with an April 2020 report finding as many as 1.5 million British people had recently gone a whole day without eating. While the UK lockdown had ended in 2021, hunger remained a concern into 2022, in part due to the ongoing UK cost of living crisis. By June 2023, according to surveys from The Food Foundation, 9 million UK adults (17% of households) experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, up from 7.3% in June 2021.
Among children
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
