People sitting in the dark to save electricity. Parents skipping meals so their children eat. People who begin eating from the parcel before they leave the food bank. Not because food has run out. Because money has.
Food banks are where the income crisis becomes visible. By the time someone needs emergency food, it is rarely the only essential they have gone without.
Our three organisations see this reality every day in every region and nation of the UK. Our work differs, but our conclusion is the same: too many people need charitable food because their incomes do not cover life’s essentials.
Last year, the Trussell community provided more than 2.6m emergency food parcels – nearly two-thirds of them to families with children. Food banks can often step in to meet the immediate need, but they cannot solve its cause. We must make sure fewer people need them in the first place.
Households referred to those food banks had an average weekly income of £104 after housing costs in 2024. The equivalent figure across UK households was £604. An unexpected bill or a delayed payment is not a temporary inconvenience. It can be the beginning of a crisis.
The public overwhelmingly wants a just and compassionate society, one where no one needs charitable food provision to survive. And that’s where we find hope. It is the same ‘hope’ the Prime Minister talked of in his first day of office, when he made ending long-term rough sleeping an urgent government commitment.
The need for emergency food demands the same urgency and clarity of political intent. It is another form of severe hardship whose drivers are understood and which determined government action can reduce and ultimately end.
Labour recognised this in 2024. Its manifesto said it wants “to end mass dependence on emergency food parcels” calling it “a moral scar on our society.”
The ambition was right then. It is also right now. We need the Prime Minister to show his government stands by this promise still.
The Prime Minister has put the cost of living at the centre of his new government. He has promised “a more preventative state”. Prevention means acting before an income shortfall becomes rent arrears, ill health, debt, homelessness, or a food bank referral. Tackling what pushes people to our doors, not simply becoming better at meeting them there.
The government is right to challenge unfair prices for essentials such as housing, water, energy and transport.
But a fair price is unaffordable when income falls below the cost of the basics. A credible living-standards plan must ask a more basic question: do people have enough to live on – to afford food, clothing, toiletries and the ordinary costs of taking part in society?
This year, our organisations, alongside The Food Foundation, Sustain, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, examined the pressures pushing households towards crisis.
Our joint reports found people held back by a flawed social security system, with unaffordable and poor-quality housing leaving people without enough for food and other essentials. Young people are also being failed at exactly the moment they need support, whether leaving school or care, moving home or starting work.
And when people do reach crisis, help is too often scarce and uneven. Additional research undertaken this summer with 5,000 young people found those who reported hardship growing up were almost twice as likely to be out of education, employment or training, and more likely to report anxiety and depression.
It also found young people postponing the milestones that open adult life: learning to drive, continuing their education, progressing in a career, moving into a home of their own.
The Timms and Milburn reviews should build better support: helping young people move into learning or good work, for example.
Conditions, sanctions, or deductions that leave someone without enough for food, heating, or the fare to work do not bring employment closer. They make the journey harder. Security is what makes opportunity possible.
The government should establish an independent process to assess whether Universal Credit covers the cost of essentials and advise ministers on how rates should change. Its work should be grounded in evidence about what essentials cost, and shaped by people who rely on the system.
They should end the freeze on Local Housing Allowance and ensure the new Crisis Resilience Fund builds the financial resilience intended through advice and cash-first support. Each of our organisations would like to be smaller in ten years’ time.
Our true measure of success is not how efficiently we distribute charitable food, but how little is needed. Food banks were never meant to become infrastructure and cannot meet need on the scale of 14m people facing food insecurity.
Community kitchens and growing projects have real value, but people should take part by choice, not necessity.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, the Prime Minister previously argued lasting progress on food insecurity required national leadership as well as local action.
Labour’s manifesto commitment to end the need for emergency food predates his premiership. The responsibility to give it new force now sits with him.
At conference, the Prime Minister should recommit to that promise and embed it within the government’s ten-year plan to rise living standards.
The test is simple: after paying the rent, the energy and water bills, and the fare to work, is there enough left for food and everything else a household needs?
For more information about the work of the charitable food sector, please visit: trussell.org.uk/living-costs-in-context
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