The potential of a UBI on food insecurity was discussed during the UBI Lab Food launch event on May 12th, 2022 13-14:00hrs BST. You can watch the discussion again: Watch here
Food insecurity is the awareness that food is going to be a struggle today. It is also the awareness that accessing food tomorrow and in the future may also be a struggle. At an individual and household level, food insecurity highlights issues of access, income, and social exclusion. Mid-year figures from the UK’s national network of food banks, the Trussell Trust, show that food bank use by September 2021 hit 935,749 people. But this is just one part of the picture.
In addition to the data from the Trussell Trust network, we need to consider the data available from the 1,124 or so independent food banks. But neither the independent data nor the Trussell Trust data get close to calculating the true numbers of households experiencing food poverty. Food bank use is a calculation simply of just that – those who have used a food bank. Yet we know that many more people will have alternative strategies in place, such as changing shopping habits, visiting family, or even skipping meals to ensure children are fed.
This is the reality of food poverty in the UK
It’s important not to simply reduce food poverty to a numerical value, as behind these figures are people with lived experiences. Recognising this triggers the subjective awareness that food poverty is a real issue. Do you have the ability to access enough food to sustain you, today, tomorrow, this week? Do you have the financial resources to do so? Is the food that you access a normal part of your diet?
Take access for example. Access to food is grounded in your ability (or inability) to source enough food, and can be linked to your location. Living in a rural locality for some may be bucolic, however, for others, it can be a source of insecurity. Supermarkets do not tend to have outlets in rural communities, and there can also be a lack of personal or community transport.
The same is true for inner-city households – large supermarkets tend to be sited in out-of-town retail parks while takeaways and convenience stores line residential streets, contributing to access to unhealthy and unaffordable foods, and increasing the social exclusion of good food. Issues of food insecurity also inevitably involve income. A lack of income has been known to push households to the food bank, a sudden place of refuge when income has failed to provide enough.
The food bank is a new phenomenon in this endeavour. Food banks have become a place of refuge for people struggling with food insecurity. Typically operating out of local churches, they provide free food to people in need. Working through a referral system, emergency food for around three days can be collected by people when income is low. But it was the welfare state envisaged by Beveridge as part of the postwar welfare consensus that should have been the safe haven for those who fell upon hard times. As a society, we all agreed that we would support those among us who needed help, and we created a redistributive social security system which was the right of every individual to use when needed.
That system has been eroded and reduced to rubble. Bureaucracy, conditionality and behaviouralism are inherent within its structure. It adheres to the notion that poverty is a lifestyle choice, and this justifies the imposition of a deserving and undeserving approach, allowing bureaucrats to withhold social security whenever they deem necessary. This structure sits well ideologically with neoliberalism. But life is not so structured – it is moveable, and things change. The structure of the current welfare system (Universal Credit) is one built upon means-testing, stigmatising and demonising users. It is also at the heart of food insecurity and food bank growth.
Time and time again, issues with Universal Credit are cited as a large contributor to food bank use. The neoliberal system of ‘carrot and stick’ (means-testing, monitoring and behaviouralism combined with sanctioning) aims to cut off the supply of much-needed social security income for vulnerable households. Sanctioning, therefore, has become reason enough to reduce, remove or delay access to financial support. To put it simple, the government restricts people’s access to food by sanctioning their income, and by doing so they fail to recognise the ‘right to food’ enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1976.
Sanctions are the removal of the welfare safety net, and the food bank, unfortunately, arrives to fill this void. As a charitable body, mainly delivered through religious organisations, a food bank would never let anyone go hungry. This may seem great on the surface – the food security problem is solved. However, these types of charitable endeavours facilitate a neoliberal government’s rolling back of the welfare state.
That is why we’re examining the potential of Universal Basic Income (UBI) – a new way to socially insure every individual from precarity, not just in terms of food, but much wider. A UBI would give people the ability to not have to choose between heating or eating, or to depend on a food bank to meet both needs. A UBI, as an unconditional cash transfer to everyone, would facilitate the closure of all food banks, as they would become unnecessary. This would help people avoid issues of food insecurity associated with poor access, income, and social exclusion and would reinforce the idea of universality we need in a modern welfare state.
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