Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Have food banks become a ‘boil of no significance’?

Remember food banks? They were a hot political issue about a year ago, with Labour MPs raising them again and again to wrong foot Tory ministers, but seem to have dropped off the political agenda, even though many of them are still seeing more people coming to them for emergency food help. Well, some politicians haven’t forgotten about them, and today the all-party parliamentary group on hunger and food poverty publishes an update on its attempts to tackle hunger in this country.

The group is led by Labour MP Frank Field, who doesn’t blow about with the political winds but tends to stick to his guns. Ministers choose whether or not to agree with him as is convenient, while acknowledging privately that he generally has a point. Today he uses some rather fruity language about the way ministers have responded to last year’s Feeding Britain report, claiming that ‘the government seems to treat the scandal of hunger as little more than a boil of no significance on our society. Nothing could be further from the truth. The body of our country is wreaked by a raging fever called hunger’.

Field’s APPG has managed to put over half of the recommendations it made into action, though looking through that list of recommendations, it’s clear that more often than not, the ones that have not been actioned, or are only partially actioned, have been the ones made to government. So now the MPs want David Cameron to chair a Cobra committee meeting on hunger, in the same way as he would for an acute national emergency, and for the government to introduce a sugar tax levy part of which will go to funding a national programme of school holiday ‘food and fun provision’.

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