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.
