Abstract
This article draws upon our perspective as academic-practitioners working in the fields of food insecurity, food systems, and inequality to comment, in the early stages of the pandemic and associated lockdown, on the empirical and ethical implications of COVID-19 for socio-economic inequalities in access to food in the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the profound insecurity of large segments of the UK population, an insecurity itself the product of a decade of ‘austerity’ policies. Increased unemployment, reduced hours, and enforced self-isolation for multiple vulnerable groups is likely to lead to an increase in UK food insecurity, exacerbating diet-related health inequalities. The social and economic crisis associated with the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the system of food charity which, at present, is a key response to growing poverty. A vulnerable food system, with just-in-time supply chains, has been challenged by stockpiling. Resultant food supply issues at food banks, alongside rapidly increasing demand and reduced volunteer numbers, has undermined many food charities, especially independent food banks. In the light of this analysis, we make a series of recommendations. We call for an immediate end to the five week wait for Universal Credit and cash grants for low income households. We ask central and local government to recognise that many food aid providers are already at capacity and unable to adopt additional responsibilities. The government’s - significant - response to the economic crisis associated with COVID-19 has underscored a key principle: it is the government’s responsibility to protect population health, to guarantee household incomes, and to safeguard the economy. Millions of households were in poverty before the pandemic, and millions more will be so unless the government continues to protect household incomes through policy change.
Highlights
This article draws upon our perspective as academic-practitioners working in the fields of food insecurity, food systems, and inequality to comment, in the early stages of the pandemic and associated lockdown, on the empirical and ethical implications of COVID-19 for socio-economic inequalities in access to food in the UK
The following changes have been made to address this: we discuss at length the relationship between Universal Credit and food insecurity and poverty, establishing the need for the removal of the five week waiting time recommendation; we discuss the particular disadvantages families with children may face as a result of Covid-19, setting up the necessity of particular policy changes for families with children; we describe the cash-first approach of the Scottish Government and argue for the English government to adopt an equivalent response; we have removed the reference to Real Living Wage and modified our recommendations for food retailers to follow-on from our arguments in the text
We consider the inequalities in income, diet, and access to food in the UK exposed and exacerbated by the social and economic crisis associated with COVID-19
Summary
We consider the inequalities in income, diet, and access to food in the UK exposed and exacerbated by the social and economic crisis associated with COVID-19 This is followed by an assessment of the resilience - and the uniformity of this resilience - of the UK food banking system in the context of the pandemic. It is impossible to comment with certainty on the impact of the continued five-week wait on poverty and food insecurity; based on the unprecedented increase in applications and previous evidence suggesting that around 60% of new Universal Credit claimants require advance payments (Sharma, 2018), it is likely that large numbers of households will need to access this facility and subsequently receive lower monthly amounts than their initial entitlement, with longer term implications for household incomes. What can we learn from these initiatives going forward would be a useful area of further research
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