The pandemic has led to a rise in food insecurity across the UK, and the problem has hit households with children harder than the general population.
A 2020 survey found that 14 per cent of adults living with children experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in the first six months of the pandemic � up from 11.5 per cent. Even with the easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, by January 2021, 2.3 million children were living in households that had experienced food insecurity in the previous six months.
The 2021 Child of the North report by the N8 Research Partnership defined food insecurity as ‘the lack of financial resources required to ensure reliable access to food to meet dietary, nutritional, and social needs’. But research by the Food Foundation found there were additional drivers of food insecurity beyond lack of income. People who were self-isolating were more likely to have gone without food because they could not go out to get it, while a lack of food in shops also drove levels up.
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