Thousands Without Food in UK Amid Austerity

Date: 21 May 2019 - 21:41

News ID: ۶۶۲۶۴

LONDON (CNN) -- The UK government is violating its obligations to ensure families have enough food to live on, according to a damning new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Monday's report said austerity-motivated cuts to the country's welfare system since the Conservative Party took power in 2010 have left thousands of families with children without adequate food. As a result, families have become reliant on aid organizations.
"The UK is the fifth largest economy in the world. It really beggars belief that in this country increasing numbers, year on year, of families are going hungry," Kartik Raj, HRW's Western Europe researcher and author of the report, told CNN.
"The government has really shirked its responsibility in terms of protecting the rights of people to food," Raj continued. "The government has a responsibility to make sure that every single one of its residents enjoys the right to food, that they have an adequate standard of living."
The report delved into food insecurity in Hull, Cambridgeshire and Oxford, three areas of England with high deprivation levels.
HRW visited the areas to document how welfare changes and cuts to government funding have impacted Britons, conducting 126 interviews with families, volunteers and staff at food banks. The group also examined official government data and statistics.
Dependence on charitable aid has surged in the last 10 years with a 5,146% increase in emergency food packages distributed, the report said, citing statistics from the Trussell Trust, the UK's largest national food bank charity.
One 23-year-old mother from Hull revealed she has skipped meals so her four-year-old daughter can eat, according to a statement from HRW.
"When you're a single mum there are very few jobs you can do that let you drop your child to school in the morning, then go to work and be back at 2.30 to pick them up. I skip meals, so my daughter can eat," said the mother who relies on a low-cost community pantry that redistributes surplus food from supermarkets.
HRW outlined three key reasons hunger has skyrocketed in Britain. The group analyzed public spending data and found successive governments since 2010 have cut public welfare funding by 44%, "outstripping cuts in many other areas of government expenditure."
The report also condemned the overhaul of the welfare system known as Universal Credit -- a government program for people on low incomes that replaces many previous benefits and tax credits, combining them into a single payment.
Thirdly, the report slammed the UK government's apparent snub of "growing evidence of a stark deterioration in the standard of living for the country's poorest residents, including skyrocketing food bank use, and multiple reports from school officials that many more children are arriving at school hungry and unable to concentrate."
A government spokesperson rejected the report's findings as "misleading," in a statement to CNN.
Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly attacked the government for neglecting the country's poorest citizens. In November, he wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May slamming her government's response to a recently published UN Special Rapporteur's report into poverty in the UK.
"The UN report should be a wake-up call about the rising levels of poverty and destitution that exist in Britain today -- this is a national emergency," Corbyn wrote, adding that the "government shames our nation by being condemned for its neglect of its poorest citizens."
"Austerity was a political choice and the UN Special Rapporteur has laid out the consequences of your Government's policies. These policies have hit disabled people, women and BAME communities particularly hard," Corbyn continued, using a British term for Black, Asian and minority ethnic people.
In January, the British Medical Journal put out a report that said food insecurity in UK was among the worst in Europe, particularly for children.
Billy McGranaghan, founder of Dad's House, an organization assisting single fathers, told CNN of his distress at seeing so many families on the breadline.
"Poverty is everywhere, it's universal," McGranaghan said on Friday shortly after dropping off a food parcel to a property in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one of capital's most affluent areas.