Tag Archives: poverty

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).

Beyond Hunger: How Communities Fight Back Against Food Insecurity and Neoliberalism a podcast

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I have been playing around with Google’s Notebook LM. One feature is the audio overview option. This produces a podcast-type audio discussion that reviews the documents that you ask it to. For this podcast, I asked it to do this for my paper, More than Just Food, which I published in 2019. I was really impressed with the outcome. The podcast lasts about 16 minutes. Have a listen. What do you think?

Narrating the power of food clubs with AI

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In a previous post, I talked about using Gemini to explore the impact of my research. Today, I am going to explore that research with a different tool:  Notebook LM. The big difference between Gemini and Notebook LM is that Gemini searches the web, and as I found, not always so successfully, while Notebook LM looks just at what you ask it to.

So I did an experiment. I put the same paper I used for the Gemini experiment, a report I am working on right now (to be released soon, so watch this space), the recently published UK national food strategy, some recent research on Food Banks by the Trussell Trust, and a link to the food ladders discussion in this blog. One of the features of Notebook LM is that it can produce a video summary of the things you ask it to look at and present it in a narrated slide show. Here is what it produced. What do you think?

At present, you don’t have the option to change the accent (sorry, and that is not me). I think it does quite a good job of juggling across a number of quite dense sources. If you want to digest things quickly, it’s a good option. There are some nuances that are missing, but this seems reasonable for a 6-minute video. What is missing from this is what happens at rung three, and where we go once we leave the food club? I’m not sure we’ve cracked that one yet.

If you want a deeper dive, Google’s Notebook LM also allows you to ask for an audio overview that lasts about 20 minutes. It does this in a rather entertaining interview style. It is worth trying out. You still need to read the documents to get the nuance, though.

Pledges, Missions and Food Security

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The government has 5 missions:  Kickstart economic growth, Take back our streets, Break down barriers to opportunity, build an NHS for the future, and Make Britain a green energy superpower.  Food security is imbricated with all these pledges. 

Economic growth means good jobs and good jobs need people who can do them. This means having healthy people and being healthy rests on being food secure.

If you are food insecure, you are also isolated.  In communities where people are isolated, there is also greater fear of crime, disaffection and anti-social behaviour.  If we are going to take back the streets, we need to make spaces for communities to grow within them.

We know that children learn better when they are nourished.  Yet too many children live in families struggling to just eat, let alone provide the nourishment needed to build healthy bodies and minds.  It isn’t right that in a country as wealthy as this, so many of our children do not have the best chance that this wealth offers. 

Too much of NHS resources are taken up with treating diet-related illness and the issues linked to social isolation.  People with healthy diets and strong social networks live better and independently for longer, even with underlying health conditions.

If we allocate farmland to producing green energy, we are not producing the food that sustains us all.  We must ensure that we take a systems view so that our energy needs do not undermine our food security in the long term. 

Food insecurity in the UK is at an astonishing rate.  According to the FSA government statistics, in autumn 2022, 1 out of every 4 adults experienced low or very low food security at some point in the previous 12 months—meaning they were frequently cutting back on portions, skipping meals, or in some severe instances, skipping meals for whole days. Nearly half, 46%, of people with household earnings of less than £32K are food insecure. More than 1 in 3 adults, 36%, who have at least 1 child are food insecure- This vulnerability increases for those with 3 or more children. In areas in the most deprived quintile, two out of every five, 40% of adults are food insecure. 

My research focuses on improving people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives and how places—the communities where people live—can foster health and well-being or create barriers that isolate and disable. 

With this in mind, and building on the UN’s 4 pillars of food security and resilience theory, I have created a framework called food ladders to help structure how people and organisations (public, private, and third sector) can collaborate in local places to increase the resources that are needed to be food secure.  (hand out materials).

The UN sees food security as more than just a financial issue.  Food access is financial, but it is also linked to legal and structural barriers.  Food security is also about availability—the food people need for a healthy and fulfilled life, which is available where they live without undue stigma, stress, and struggle.  It is also concerned with utilisation—do people have resources, including money, knowledge, know-how, tools, and mental and physical states, to utilise the available food they can access?  And fourth, is this all consistent and sustainable for the future?

When you are wealthy, you can have healthy meals delivered, but this is not an option for most of us all the time. We need other resources like having a shop we can walk to, an able body that lets us carry our food home, a home with a kitchen and tools that work, knowledge about what different foods are and how to cook them, and the head space to be able to do all that. 

Health is negatively impacted when people are food insecure, leading to a downward spiral of deeper food insecurity.  Repairing is much easier when people are not in crisis or have never been. 

How we organise food support makes a big difference to who and how people use it and what they can get from itFood gets people in the door.  When they come back, more support will be provided.  So many of the organisations I have worked with talk about how this.   Yet, we know that one of the most significant barriers is getting people the support they need, and there is a lot we still don’t know.  But what I do know is that there is a big difference between a food club and a food bank or a social eating space and a soup kitchen, and this has to do with how values are expressed through the ways that food is made available.

The Food Ladders offer a three-rung approach to capitalise on these differences. 

  1. Catching for those who need immediate support, but we don’t want people to keep coming back to this rung. What we want is for people to move to rungs 2 and 3. 
  2. Capacity building enhances the assets and resources people and communities already have and contributes to those that they don’t
  3. And finally, self-organising activity that increases sustainability and removes or redistributes vulnerability to make a fairer society. 

One organisation (of many) I work with, TBBT, facilitates food clubs across 124 community locations, mainly in the north of England.  We did a survey with members that resulted in more than 9k responses.   We found that as a result of using the club, people reported

  1. Increased fruit and veg uptake
  2. Cooking more healthy food at home
  3. They also get involved in food talk with club members and build friendships.  The majority say they feel less alone and feel more involved in their communities. These friendships turn into mutual aid. During lockdown, people shared advice and checked in with each other through WhatsApp groups. 
  4. The majority had not used any food support before using the food club, but of those who had said they used a food bank, most said they used them less frequently or stopped using them altogether. 
  5. We know that when we have thriving communities, the fear of crime decreases.  Food activities such as food clubs and social eating spaces support thriving communities.  To take back our streets, we need to make space for people on those streets to intermingle and eat together.  

Despite this and the increases in these activities, our communities are dominated by interventions that do not increase food security capability.

To facilitate food ladders, we need:

  1. More resources and industry collaboration for community food programmes that don’t reinforce the status quo but instead build capabilities at rungs 2 and 3. 
  2. A national mandate and funding for local food strategies.
  3. Investment in social development programmes to ensure that people have the capabilities to live a healthy life.
  4. Adequate incomes that offer living wages and advancement opportunities, with a safety net for those who cannot access work.
  5. Free school meals for all children in state schools would be great, but at a minimum, lifting the earnings threshold should be a priority.
  6. A review of business rates such that those businesses that predominantly offer healthy foods are not disadvantaged because they have more risk compared to those who offer few healthy foods. 

And finally, I offer a plea for better data with larger sample sizes.  Without understanding, we cannot produce insights that lead to change.

5–8 minutes