Category Archives: UK

Evidence submission to the Right to Food UK Commission

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Yesterday the Right to Food Commission in the UK published its report for 2026. There is a lot in the report to encourage and much of it supports what my research shows. It was nice to see my Building Resilience report and the evidence I submitted referenced in the final document. I am sharing my evidence submission here (RTF106). I am particularly pleased to see the themes of dignity and the interconnectedness of conditions that shape people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives.

Submitted by: Dr Megan Blake, School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield
Evidence base: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, commissioned by Comic Relief as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme.

Summary

This submission responds to the Commission’s questions on food insecurity, food support, community-based solutions, social protection, policy duties, monitoring and accountability. It draws on a large-scale independent study of 14,156 lower-income households across England and Scotland, showing that food insecurity is not a series of isolated emergencies but a condition of structural precarity that erodes household resilience over time.

The central argument is that a right to food law must guarantee adequate income, prevent food insecurity, invest in dignified community food infrastructure without substituting for state duties, monitor progress effectively, and ensure that people most affected shape accountability.

1. Introduction: who is submitting evidence and why?

I am Dr Megan Blake, a geographer in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield. For more than twenty years, my research has focused on food insecurity, community food systems, poverty, resilience and the everyday conditions that enable or prevent people from accessing the food they need to live well.

I am submitting evidence because the Right to Food Commission is asking not only how people are fed in moments of hunger, but how the UK can reduce hunger and make the right to food a reality by 2030.

This evidence draws primarily on research I completed for Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security. Based on a survey of 14,156 lower-income adults across England and Scotland, the report shows that food insecurity is more than a moment of crisis. It is produced through the interaction of income, housing, care, health, transport, local food access, diet, wellbeing and social connection. The report therefore does two things: it diagnoses the conditions that make food insecurity more likely, and it shows why interventions such as food clubs can help when they support capability and infrastructure over time, while remaining secondary to adequate income and statutory protection.

2. Commission question: Food insecurity in the UK — what are the challenges?

The main challenge is that food insecurity is often treated as a temporary emergency, when for many households it is a prolonged condition of structural precarity.

Food insecurity is not only hunger. It is pressure, instability and constant calculation. It is parents and grandparents quietly absorbing hardship so children can eat. It is people stretching food, skipping meals, keeping the heating off, managing debts and making impossible decisions about what can wait and what cannot.

In the survey, more than one in five respondents were either worried about having enough food or were actively food insecure in the three months before the survey. Among those classified as food insecure, 66% reported feeling hungry because they could not afford food and 42.9% reported skipping meals for a full day, not by choice.

However, the challenge is not only economic. Food insecurity is shaped by whether people have the conditions needed to turn food into a secure, healthy and dignified life. Money matters, but so do health, housing, transport, time, care, energy, social connection and the local food environment.

This matters because the ability to eat well depends on more than being able to buy food in principle. People need shops nearby that sell affordable, good-quality food. They need transport to reach those shops when local provision is poor. They need housing that enables food to be stored, prepared and eaten: adequate kitchen space, a working cooker, fridge and freezer, enough storage, safe appliances and manageable energy costs. They need the physical and mental health, time and caring capacity to plan, cook and eat. They also need local community infrastructure that provides support before crisis becomes catastrophic.

Rural respondents reported particularly poor access and lower perceived quality, showing that people can live in regions associated with food production and still be poorly served by the food system.

Food insecurity is also shaped by the conditions inside the home. The report shows that food-insecure respondents were much more likely than food-secure respondents to report poor mental health, poor physical health, being unable to work because of a long-term health condition, and full-time caring responsibilities. Food-insecure respondents were almost three times as likely to report poor mental health and twice as likely to report poor physical health as food-secure respondents. They were also more than three and a half times as likely to be unable to work because of a long-term health condition.

This is why the report describes food insecurity as an ‘architecture of hardship’. The problem is not simply that people lack food, money or skills. It is that low income, weak financial resilience, poor health, insecure housing, transport barriers, caring responsibilities, poor local food access, energy costs and social isolation interact over time and erode people’s ability to cope.

A right to food law must address the wider conditions that make food insecurity likely, rather than treating hunger as an emergency to be filled after it appears.

3. Commission question: What is working to improve access to food? Capacity-building and community food infrastructure

The evidence suggests that what works is not simply the distribution of food, but support that builds the conditions through which people can access, use, share and benefit from food with dignity.

The Food Ladders framework demonstrates how different types of support do different work and must not be collapsed into ‘food aid’: catching people in crisis; capacity building with people and communities; and transformation, where communities reshape local food systems.

The research focuses on food clubs as one important example of capacity-building provision. However, the wider point is not that food clubs alone are the answer. Food clubs, pantries, social eating spaces, community kitchens, cook-alongs, shared cooking facilities, community growing, local voucher schemes and food co-operatives can all create practical routes through which people obtain food, use food, build relationships and participate in local food systems.

These activities matter because food resilience is not only about whether food exists in the system. It is also about whether people have the money, time, transport, energy, storage, equipment, health, confidence and social support to turn food into meals, nourishment, care and everyday security.

The report found that regular and sustained participation in food clubs was associated with better food security. It also identified plausible mechanisms through which food clubs may operate as ‘more-than-food’ interventions: affordable food, social connection, wellbeing, confidence and routes into wider support.

The Commission should not treat access to food as a question of emergency supply alone. It should also ask what infrastructure enables food to become meals, nourishment, care and everyday security. Community food projects should not become a substitute welfare system. Properly resourced and publicly accountable, they can form part of the social and public health infrastructure that makes the right to food real in everyday life.

4. Commission question: Experiences of seeking support from food banks, food pantries and other food services — what works, and how?

Food banks, food clubs and dual use reflect different experiences of hardship, so they should not be collapsed into one ‘food aid’ category.

Free food support, including emergency parcels, cash handouts and food vouchers, remains essential in acute crisis. It provides immediate relief when households have no other option. However, it is not designed to rebuild the foundations of everyday life after prolonged hardship.

The report’s comparative analysis shows that food banks are more closely associated with acute crisis, while food clubs are more often used by households managing chronic precarity from a position of slightly greater stability. A third group, using both food banks and food clubs, appears to be experiencing compounded hardship, including in-work poverty, caring responsibilities and multiple pressures at once.

Food clubs, pantries and similar models appear to help where they provide continuity, choice, routine and a less stigmatising form of support. For households living with ongoing pressure, regular access to affordable food, including fresh and varied food, can help people plan, stretch budgets and reduce uncertainty.

The evidence also shows that these models work socially. Food insecurity is isolating and stigmatising. It damages mental health, social connection and people’s capacity to care for others. The report identifies a ‘buffering effect’: while food insecurity damages wellbeing, active engagement with a food club appears to weaken the relationship between hardship and poor physical health or social isolation.

Food support should not be assessed only by how much food is distributed. We also need to ask what hardship a service responds to, whether it is dignified, whether it improves stability, health and wellbeing, and whether it helps people move away from crisis. Food clubs and community food projects cannot substitute for adequate income, secure work or social protection; their role is to complement statutory provision by helping repair some of the damage caused by prolonged food insecurity.

5. Commission question: What is not working?

The current system is too reliant on emergency response. Emergency food aid cannot, on its own, address the conditions that make people food insecure in the first place.

Food insecurity cannot be solved by handing over food, vouchers or advice and assuming that people’s capabilities have been restored. Many households are living within conditions that repeatedly constrain what they can do: inadequate income, insecure housing, poor transport, limited time and energy, ill health, caring responsibilities, weak local food access, poor cooking or storage infrastructure, social isolation and limited trusted support.

The system also treats food insecurity as an individual problem. This can lead to responses focused on budgeting, cooking skills or behaviour change. The evidence from the report challenges this framing. Many people experiencing food insecurity already demonstrate considerable skill, care and resourcefulness. The issue is not that people lack capability in a simple sense. It is that their capabilities are being worn down by systems and circumstances that make secure, healthy and dignified food access difficult to sustain.

A right to food approach should avoid treating charitable food provision as the solution. It should ask why people are being made reliant on food aid, which state and market systems are constraining capability, and what duties are needed to prevent those constraints from recurring.

6. Commission question: What is the role of social protection, income support and a living wage?

Adequate income is foundational to the right to food.

The research shows that food insecurity is strongly linked to financial fragility. Households unable to afford an unexpected £100 expense were far more likely to be food insecure. This matters because shocks do not have to be large to be destabilising. A broken washing machine, school shoes, a transport cost, a late payment charge or an unexpected bill can push a household into crisis when there is no financial buffer.

The evidence also shows that work is not a guaranteed route out of food insecurity. People in work, including people in full-time work, are using food support because wages and household income do not reliably meet the cost of living. Food insecurity is therefore not confined to people outside employment.

A right to food law must therefore be connected to adequate social security, decent wages, secure work and household costs. Food support can help people cope, stabilise and rebuild, but it cannot substitute for income that is sufficient to live on.

7. Commission question: What policies affect families’ ability to feed themselves and their communities?

Policies affecting food insecurity extend well beyond food policy.

The ability to feed oneself and one’s family is shaped by social security, wages, employment conditions, housing, transport, childcare, disability support, energy costs, local government funding and the availability of affordable nutritious food in local places.

This is why a right to food law should include a duty to assess the food security implications of wider policy decisions. A policy that reduces household income, increases debt, limits mobility, cuts local services, weakens disability support or increases housing costs can also reduce people’s ability to secure food.

The right to food should therefore be treated as a cross-government responsibility, not as a narrow issue for food charities or local community organisations.

8. Commission question: What solutions reach those most marginalised?

The research points to the need for layered, local and dignified support. Some households are in acute crisis and need emergency help. Others are managing chronic precarity and need continuity, affordable food, routine and wider support. Others need opportunities to rebuild confidence, connection, community power and local food infrastructure.

The Food Ladders framework helps identify these different needs and avoid a one-size-fits-all response. It also highlights the importance of ‘rails’: the partnerships, anchor organisations, local authorities, funders, food networks and advice services that hold local support systems together.

For marginalised groups, access must be designed around real lives, including stigma, disability, care, transport, opening hours, cultural appropriateness, rural access, digital exclusion and awareness. People should not have to prove desperation before they are treated with dignity.

9. Commission question: How could a right to food law work in the UK?

A right to food law should not simply state an aspiration. It should create clear duties to prevent, protect and fulfil the right to food, with national government carrying primary responsibility.

This means recognising that food security depends on both household resources and local conditions. People need enough income, but they also need access to affordable nutritious food, transport, time, suitable housing, cooking and storage facilities, social support and services that do not stigmatise them.

The legal framework should include duties across national and local government, with adequate funding and powers attached. Local authorities and community organisations should support delivery but not carry responsibility without the resources or authority to act.

10. Commission question: What should government duties include?

Because food insecurity is produced across systems, accountability must also be cross-system, while remaining clearly anchored in statutory responsibility. Duties should focus not only on responding to hunger, but on building the conditions through which people can access and use food with dignity.

First, a duty to prevent food insecurity, including assessment of how policies affecting income, housing, welfare, wages, disability support, childcare, transport and energy shape people’s ability to secure food.

Second, a duty to ensure adequate income, through social security and wages that meet the cost of living, so that people are not forced to rely on food aid to meet basic needs.

Third, a duty to protect children, carers and people facing compounded disadvantage, including year-round nutritional support and tailored support for households whose caring responsibilities, health needs or living conditions constrain their food security.

Fourth, a duty to invest in publicly accountable local food infrastructure, including food partnerships, affordable food clubs, community kitchens, food co-operatives, growing schemes, advice services and other models that strengthen local capabilities and access.

Fifth, a duty to address unequal local food environments, especially where people face poor access to affordable, nutritious food or lack the transport, services or infrastructure needed to use it.

Sixth, a duty to ensure dignity and reduce stigma, so that food support is accessible, culturally appropriate, non-punitive and designed with those most affected.

Seventh, a duty to support a continuum of provision, recognising that crisis response, capacity building and community-led transformation all have a role in preventing hardship, repairing damage and building resilience.

11. Commission question: How could we monitor the impact and progress of a right to food law?

It is not enough to count emergency parcels. Many people experiencing food insecurity do not use food banks, and some use other forms of support.

Monitoring should include regular national and local measurement of household food insecurity, using robust and comparable indicators with large sample sizes. It should also include measures of diet quality, access to affordable fresh food, wellbeing, social connection, use of different support models and barriers to access.

Monitoring should also examine where local food infrastructure exists, who can access it, and whether it is sustainable. The question is not how much emergency support is provided, but whether people and communities are moving towards stability, dignity, health, connection, adequate income and reduced reliance on crisis provision.

12. Commission question: What accountability mechanism would ensure the voices of those most impacted are collected and acted upon?

People with living experience of food insecurity should be involved in defining problems, designing responses, reviewing progress and identifying unintended harms.

Accountability should not mean listening politely and carrying on as before. It should require institutions to show what changed: which priorities shifted, which harms were recognised, which decisions were amended, and how people’s everyday experience of food insecurity was acted upon.

Local food partnerships could play an important role, but only if properly resourced and connected to statutory duties. Community organisations hold deep local knowledge but should not be expected to carry responsibility without funding, authority or support.

13. Conclusion

The right to food will not be achieved by food parcels alone, nor by assuming that people simply need to cook better, budget better or make better choices.

The evidence from this research shows that food insecurity is a condition of structural precarity. It is produced through low income, insecure work, inadequate social security, housing pressures, caring responsibilities, poor health, transport barriers and unequal local food environments. It damages bodies, minds, relationships and communities.

A right to food approach must prevent hardship, repair damage and build the conditions that allow people and communities to live well. That starts with adequate incomes, secure work, strong social protection and decent housing, alongside accessible local food environments and accountable community food infrastructure.

Food banks save lives in moments of acute crisis, and they remain essential. But we cannot ‘catch’ our way out of food insecurity. A right to food law should be judged by whether it reduces the need for crisis food aid while creating the conditions for people to access food with dignity, stability, connection and hope.

Launch of ‘Lets put hunger to bed’: A new campaign from Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s

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Since 2022 I have advised Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s on the Nourish the Nation Campaign. This campaign has now ended, but been replaced by ‘Let’s put hunger to bed’. I was asked to speak alongside Simon Roberts (CEO, Sainsbury’s) and Samir Patel (CEO, Comic Relief) at the celebration event hosted at Sainsbury’s headquarters. I wanted to share my talk.

Paula’s story is one covered in The Bread and Butter Thing’s podcast. These stories from real people who use their food clubs cover a range of topics and are very insightful. The other people mentioned are from interviews being conducted as part of a current research project looking at the impacts of climate induced price inflation on UK households who are already struggling to have the food they need to live thier best lives.

Paula described going from what she called a ‘normal life’ to not being able to buy a birthday present for her granddaughter after her husband suffered a brutal attack that left him unable to work.

Then she said this:

‘By the first Christmas after the attack, we were on our knees. I remember we had a loaf of bread and a packet of chicken crisps for Christmas dinner.’

What struck me about Paula’s story is how quickly an ordinary life can become fragile.

I’m a geographer at the University of Sheffield, and my work looks at how food insecurity is experienced in everyday life — not just as hunger, but as pressure, instability, and the erosion of resilience over time.

For the research with Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s, we surveyed more than 14,000 lower-income households across the UK to better understand the role food clubs play in people’s lives.

And what we found was that food insecurity is rarely a single crisis.

More often, it is a slow wearing down of people’s ability to cope.

A bereavement.
A health problem.
Rising costs.

Hours being cut at work.
Caring responsibilities.

And slowly, the foundations underneath everyday life begin to weaken.

One woman we spoke with —Donna — was in her forties. Her husband died the previous year, and she described struggling deeply with her mental health afterwards. Her adult son had moved back home because he was undergoing cancer treatment. They were both working, but things were still incredibly tight.

Donna also has Type 2 diabetes and needs to eat regularly because she takes insulin.

She talked about how, before joining the food club, she would skip meals so there would be enough food for her grandchildren, who live with them part of the week.

And then she said something very simple:
‘Kids come first, definitely.’

I think that sentence captures something very important about food insecurity in Britain today.

A huge amount of hardship is hidden.

Parents and grandparents absorb it quietly.
They stretch food.
Skip meals.
Keep the heating off.
Manage debts.
Make impossible calculations about what can wait and what cannot.

Donna carefully timed her heating so that when the children were there, they would at least be warm.

She talked about how transport costs could wipe out the money she needed for food.

She talked about making meals stretch with potatoes and soups.

That is not simply budgeting.

That is survival planning.

Again and again in the research, people demonstrated enormous skill, care, and resourcefulness.

One of the central findings from the study is that food insecurity is not simply about a lack of food.

It is what the report calls an ‘architecture of hardship’.

Housing.
Transport.
Health.
Energy costs.
And the constant struggle of trying to hold everything together.

These pressures interact and accumulate over time.

Importantly, the research also challenges a lot of assumptions.

First, people often imagine food insecurity as something that affects people outside of work.

But we heard from nurses, carers, pensioners, parents, and people working multiple jobs.

Second, the issue was not that people did not know how to cook or budget.

Many households experiencing food insecurity were already highly skilled at coping.

The issue was that people were trying to manage impossible pressures for prolonged periods of time.

One of the important findings from the research was that food clubs and food banks are not the same thing — and they are not competing with each other. In the report, I describe this through the Food Ladders approach: different forms of support helping people at different moments of hardship and recovery.

Food banks provide emergency support during an acute crisis.

But food clubs often operate differently.

They provide continuity.
Choice.
Fresh food.
Routine.
Social connection.
And importantly, dignity.

Donna described how the food club meant she no longer had to skip meals herself because there was enough food in the house for everyone.

And because she was eating more regularly, she was better able to manage her diabetes and be there for her son’s children.

That is important.

This is not just about food parcels.

This is about people’s physical and mental health.
Their capacity to cope.
Their ability to care for others.

Another woman, Amy, described how the food club helped her multigenerational household of five women, ranging from aged 8 to 82, maintain access to vegetables and fruit that would otherwise become too expensive.

She talked about cooking collectively, sharing responsibility but also sharing food with other struggling families in the village.

What comes through is not dependency, but active care, skill, and mutual support.

That matters because resilience is social.

One of the strongest findings from the research was what we described as a buffering effect.

Food insecurity damages wellbeing across the board — physically, emotionally, and socially.

But people actively engaged with food clubs often appeared less isolated and more supported than we might otherwise expect, given the pressures they were under.

Both Donna and Amy described the people at the food club as becoming ‘practically a family.’

And I think that language matters.

Now, I do want to say something important here.

Food clubs are not a silver bullet.

No community organisation can solve poverty on its own.

No volunteer network can compensate for inadequate incomes, insecure work, rising housing costs, or weak social safety nets.

And this room reflects something very important: there is no single model that solves food insecurity.

Emergency food aid matters.
Community food projects matter.
Advice services matter.
Schools matter.
Local authorities matter.
Retailers matter.
National policy matters.

Different organisations are responding to different parts of the hardship equation.

But what food clubs help us see is that resilience is not built through food alone.

It is built through relationships.
Through continuity.
Through dignity.
Through creating spaces where people feel recognised and supported rather than judged.

And one of the findings I found most hopeful was that people who engaged with food clubs more regularly and over longer periods were more likely to be food secure.

That matters because it suggests we are not simply seeing emergency relief.

We are seeing the possibility of stabilisation.
Of recovery.
Of rebuilding.

And this matters enormously for children.

Because ultimately, well-fed children depend on well-supported adults and well-supported communities around them.

They need adults who are not constantly exhausted, anxious, isolated or forced into impossible trade-offs.

And that means tackling hunger is not just about responding to emergencies after they happen.

It is about building the conditions that allow people to live with dignity, stability, connection, and hope before a crisis becomes catastrophic.

That is why campaigns like Let’s Put Hunger to Bed matter.

Not simply because they help people eat tonight — though that is vitally important.

But because they help create the foundations from which people and communities can begin to rebuild resilience itself.

Thank you.

Here are the links to both Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief’s materials about the new fund.

You can find the research here, and another blog post where I talk about it a bit more.

Building Resilience: UK Food Clubs and Food Security

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I’ve been poor for so long that I’ve learned to live on one main meal plus one snack a day. I think most people would class that as ‘skipping’ a meal, but for me that’s just normal, and has been for many years now.’ (Non-Food Club User, YouGov survey, 2025)

In May and June 2025 I worked with YouGov to conduct a suvery of more than 14,000 UK households with earnings of <£40K and who lived in areas of greater deprivation (IMD quintiles 1-3). Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme, funded this research (UoS Project 12570).

The report of the findings, titled Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, is published on Comic Relief’s website.

This video, produced using Notebook LM, covers some of key highlights from the report.

In addition to specifics about the survey and methodology and recommendations, the report contains five substantive sections. These are:

  1. Analysis of food insecurity among the respondents.
  2. Analysis of food club use and survey respondent engagement.
  3. Analysis of the impacts of food clubs.
  4. A comparison of food club users to those who use no services, food bank users, and those who use both services.
  5. An analysis of why people stop using food clubs

Coverage of the report has included BBC radio interviews highlighting what food clubs are, an article in The Grocer, and two linked articles in The Guardian by Patrick Butler. These later highlight the elements of the study that demonstrate the difficulties rural people on low incomes face in accessing food.

The study makes recommendations for the government and provides evidence that local authorities can use when planning and implementing the new three-year Crisis and Resilience fund. Councils are now producing plans to implement the fund, and some have begun to signpost its resources. See, for example, how Sheffield City Council is implementing both the Crisis and Resilience (through Welcoming Places) elements of the funding.

The report’s findings are also likely to be useful to charities as they consider how to help their communities. This campaign raised over £26m and supported more than 2.4m people facing food insecurity, of which £7.7m went toward supporting 598 food clubs (see the impact report for more detail and this report by the Tavistock Institute.

The food club model is widely seen and experienced as impactful and life-changing, providing preventative and reparative support for households experiencing ongoing food insecurity as a result of financial precarity. It successfully assists those in need, while complementing, rather than replacing, emergency food banks. Food clubs help households stretch limited budgets, improve access to nutritious food, provide a welcoming space for social connection and create pathways to wider support services. (Tavistock Institute, 2026).

Examples of food clubs that were funded through the Nourish the Nation funding and how they are drawing on the Food Ladders incude:

Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief have launched a new campaign, Lets put hunger to bed, that builds on the foundations of the Nourish the Nation campaign and was informed by findings from this report. According to Comic Relief:

Our aim is to help end child and family hunger, ensuring families have the stability, resources and dignity they need to thrive. We will do this by supporting community-led organisations, with the aim to:

  1. Improve children and families’ health and wellbeing through access to good, nutritious food
  2. Strengthen family resilience to crisis and hardship through wraparound support
  3. Support longer-term change by bringing together communities, funders and decision-makers, and by advocating for policies that better support families.

This programme recognises that child food insecurity does not exist in isolation. Families are affected by wider pressures such as low income, insecure housing and rising living costs. Alongside practical support, the programme aims to improve the systems and policies that shape families’ lives.

The Resilience Dividend: A New Strategy for UK Food Security

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Prioritising Community Repair over Emergency Relief

1. Executive Summary

This briefing reframes the strategic approach to addressing UK food insecurity, drawing on recent evidence. The findings reposition the policy focus away from reactive responses and towards a primary strategy of prevention and resilience. For the large majority of households navigating a persistent struggle with food insecurity, holistic, community-based models that repair financial and social wellbeing are the first line of defence. For the smaller, specific group who reach a crisis point of immediate need, a cash-based response should be available as a last resort. This evidence calls for a re-prioritisation of policy and investment towards a three-rung pathway: a preventative financial foundation, a primary strategy of community resilience-building, and a targeted response for acute need.

2. The Primary Strategy: Building Holistic Resilience

The primary strategy for tackling food insecurity must focus on building holistic resilience. For many, food insecurity is “not a temporary emergency, but a prolonged, structural crisis”—a persistent and recurring struggle that erodes wellbeing over time. The national study, Building Resilience [1], provides robust evidence that this state of long-term precarity inflicts compounding harm, which the report finds “cash alone cannot repair.” This underscores the need for a strategy that moves beyond purely financial solutions. The benefits of holistic, relational support are crucial for the broad range of households worn down by a persistent struggle, including many in work. This person-centred approach is also why such models are more suitable than a simple cash transaction for individuals with more complex needs, such as addiction or severe mental health challenges. The focus must be on “more-than-food” community models that can repair harm and build capacity for all.

  • Methodology: The findings from this national study are based on a large-scale comparative analysis, designed as a ‘natural experiment’. The survey, conducted by YouGov in May and June 2025, included 14,156 adults from low-income households. The study compares the outcomes of food club members against a demographically similar group of non-members. This robust methodology, combining descriptive statistics and advanced regression modelling, allows the impact of the food club model on food security, diet, and wellbeing to be clearly isolated and defined.

These models provide both a reparative and preventative function vital to eliminating the need for emergency food aid.

  • A Pathway out of Food Insecurity: Relational models like food clubs are a proven mechanism for recovery. By providing consistent access to affordable, nutritious food, they measurably improve diets and create the stability needed for households to move out of food insecurity.
  • Repairing Wellbeing and Rebuilding Social Capital: The report identifies these models as vital social hubs that directly counteract the isolation that often accompanies prolonged crises. This regular, relational engagement rebuilds confidence and social networks, providing a “powerful buffering effect against the severe negative psychological impacts of food insecurity.”
  • A Preventive Function: By repairing the underlying damage to household wellbeing and nutrition, these interventions build lasting resilience. This, in turn, acts as a preventative measure, reducing the likelihood of future emergencies and decreasing long-term reliance on any form of crisis support.

3. A Targeted Tool for Acute Need: The ‘Last Resort’ Role of Cash

For the specific cohort of households who reach a crisis point of acute, immediate need—a group often directed towards food banks—the evaluation of the Leeds City Council Cash Grant Pilot [2] provides compelling evidence that a cash-based model is a more effective and dignified response than traditional in-kind food aid in this urban setting. It should be positioned as a vital, last-resort tool, not the central pillar of a national strategy.

  • Methodology: The Leeds pilot evaluation employed a mixed-methods approach to assess the impact of a six-month cash grant scheme that ran from October 2021 to April 2022. The research included a quantitative survey with 144 grant recipients, as well as in-depth qualitative interviews with 26 recipients and 12 staff members from referral agencies. This methodology provided rich, user-focused insights into the immediate impact of a grant; however, the evaluation notes the lack of a control group as a limitation in defining long-term outcomes.
  • Dignity and Choice: 94% of recipients stated they would prefer a cash grant over a food parcel, valuing the agency and dignity it provides.
  • Effective Management of Immediate Needs: The grants provided “breathing space,” with funds used for food and other essentials like gas, and electricity payments.

However, the Leeds evaluation confirmed its limits as a long-term solution. With 81% of recipients feeling it was likely they would need to use a food bank again, the evidence is clear: an emergency cash grant is like pumping air into a flat tyre—it provides an immediate, essential fix, but if the underlying puncture is not repaired, the air will quickly leak out again.

4. Nutritional Outcomes: Beyond Emergency Rations

While emergency cash provides the means to buy food, it does not guarantee a healthier diet during a cost-of-living crisis. The Leeds pilot found that the crisis “restricted their ability to afford to buy healthier food.” In contrast, the food club model is shown to directly improve nutritional outcomes by providing consistent and affordable access to a wider variety of fresh and healthy food.

5. The Strategic Risk of an Imbalanced Approach

A singular focus on emergency cash grants, while administratively appealing, is an unsustainable and strategically flawed approach. The simplicity and clear metrics of cash distribution create a significant risk that policy and funding become “stuck” in a reactive loop, neglecting the more complex, long-term work of building resilience.

  • Sustainability and Value for Money: An emergency cash grant is a short-term, high-cost intervention per household. While it provides vital, flexible relief, it does not build capacity. A system that only offers emergency grants is inherently unsustainable, as it fails to reduce future need. Actual value for money is achieved by investing in preventative and resilience-building models that reduce the long-term demand on crisis services. A community-based model can leverage the same investment to provide nutritional, social, and psychological support to a larger number of people over a more extended period, yielding a significantly higher social return on investment.

6. A Comprehensive Strategy: Three Modes of Support

The evidence suggests a three-pronged approach to effective food security policy. To be sustainable, the primary strategy must address the broad, structural issue of long-term hardship. At the same time, the response to acute need serves a smaller, specific population as a last resort.

  • Foundation: Prevention (‘Cash Before’). The first line of defence is an adequate and reliable financial safety net through social security and wages that meet the cost of living.
  • Rung 2: Resilience-Building (‘More-Than-Food’). This is the primary strategy for the majority of households, including many in work, who are navigating a persistent struggle with food insecurity. For this large group, hardship is a long-term reality, not a one-off emergency. Community-based models offer a reparative and preventive pathway out of this state of precarity.
  • Rung 1: Response to Acute Need (‘Cash First’). As a last resort for households that experience a crisis point of immediate need, a rapid and dignified response is essential. Reflecting the rich, user-focused insights from the Leeds pilot—which confirmed the value of cash for immediate relief while its methodology limited conclusions on long-term impact—a flexible cash-based payment is preferable to an emergency food parcel because it is more dignified in affording people choice, and more effective because it allows them to address the multi-faceted nature of their crisis by meeting other urgent needs, such as paying for utilities, alongside buying food. The system must remain adaptable for individuals with complex needs where cash is not the most appropriate support.

While the current policy landscape is disproportionately focused on emergency responses, a fully effective system requires all three rungs to be in place. The strategic priority must be to correct the current imbalance by investing in the overlooked upstream work of prevention and resilience-building. However, in designing this more robust system, a tailored response for acute need must be retained. Omitting this final component creates an “emergency gap,” leaving those with acute need without support and creating a mismatch of need and provision that weakens the overall strategy.

7. Policy Recommendations

To create a complete and sustainable pathway from crisis to security, policy must reflect a clear balance of priorities that acknowledges a context of limited resources. The primary focus must be on upstream interventions that prevent crisis and build long-term resilience, as these offer the greatest social return on investment.

  1. Priority 1: Strengthen the Foundation with Targeted Reforms. While wholesale strengthening of the social security system is the ultimate goal, targeted, cost-effective reforms can have a significant preventative impact. The government should prioritise addressing known drivers of hardship, for example, by ending the five-week wait for Universal Credit and removing the two-child benefit cap. These specific actions would provide a more stable financial foundation for low-income families, reducing the number who fall into crisis.
  2. Priority 2: Invest in Holistic Resilience-Building. The primary investment strategy should be to fund and scale community-based, capacity-building models. While the evidence strongly supports the effectiveness of affordable food clubs, the principle is broader. A dedicated ‘Community Resilience Fund’ should be established to support proven interventions that provide holistic, relational support for long-term recovery.
  3. Priority 3: Formalise an Integrated Emergency Response. The government should support the integration of cash grants into local welfare assistance schemes as the default model for acute emergency relief, positioned as a last-resort safety net. This is not a call for new funding, but a reform of existing emergency systems. To be effective, the allocation process must be transparent and integrated. Local schemes should publish clear eligibility criteria and provide clarity on how grant awards are calculated, while still allowing for discretion by assessors. Crucially, referral agencies providing this emergency support must be resourced to provide a ‘warm handover’ to ‘Rung 2’ resilience-building services, creating a clear and supportive pathway from the immediate crisis response to long-term repair.

About the Author: Dr. Megan Blake is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on food security, social resilience, and community-based food systems. This briefing is based on the findings from her comprehensive national study, Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, and her analysis of the evidence from the Leeds Cash Grant Pilot evaluation.

[1] Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security (2025) is the first large-scale, independent analysis of the affordable food club model in the UK. The research, by Dr. Megan Blake at the University of Sheffield, was funded by Comic Relief as part of the Nourish the Nation Campaign funded by Sainsbury’s. Available at https://assets.ctfassets.net/zsfivwzfgl3t/5Nkhx11c3EiNcw2EwfIDMG/3b835a7cef5fb0f7b7a7bbb6a60c280d/Building_Resilience__The_Role_of_Food_Clubs_in_UK_Food_Security_Full_Report.pdf


[2]Lipscomb, L. and C. Walker.  2022.  An Evaluation of the Leeds City Council Cash Grant Pilot

Programme.  Available online (https://cms.trussell.org.uk/sites/default/files/wp-assets/Vantage-Point-Research-Leeds-Cash-First-evaluation.pdf).