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Keir  Starmer is facing accusations of yet another Labour betrayal after the UK’s biggest food bank charity warned that the country is “sleepwalking” into a “new normal” of permanent hunger and hardship.

The Trussell Trust says one in six households in the UK went hungry last year, including nearly four million children.

Food insecurity is spreading fastest among working families: carers, bus drivers, NHS porters — the people who keep the country running.

Three in 10 people referred to food banks in 2024 were from working households, up from 24 per cent in 2022. That shift reinforces what This Site has been saying for years: that having a job is no longer a reliable defence against hunger.

It is now decades since having a job meant being free of hunger.

I can tell you this is not a statistic to be discussed from a safe distance: I am one of the adults going hungry.

As Vox Political readers will be aware, I work every day producing journalism that people want to read – multiple stories per day – but social media algorithms that strip away the reach that would otherwise fund my work leave me with an extremely low income, regularly worrying about how to feed myself.

If this is happening to a professional, working for a living every day, how many millions more are silently skipping meals?

The Trussell Trust operates roughly 1,400 food bank outlets across the United Kingdom. Its biennial Hunger in the UK report estimates more than 14 million people were food-insecure last year, compared with 11.6 million in 2022.

Families in deprived areas were three times as likely to go hungry as those in better-off neighbourhoods.

The charity points to a single policy that has driven much of this rise: the two-child limit on benefits.

The rule withholds £3,500 a year in social security support from third and subsequent children in families on Universal Credit — a financial cliff that forces parents into impossible choices.

(Before anybody writes in to point out that the two-child limit doesn’t affect Yr Obdt Srvt – me – because I don’t have children: bear in mind that this is about the rise since 2022 – and only “much” of it.)

Labour went to the polls in 2024 promising to “end mass dependence on food parcels”, and called reliance on food banks a “moral scar” on the United Kingdom.

A year into office, the picture is one of promise without urgency; “I’m all right, Jack,” if you like.

There is a child poverty strategy due this autumn – and distant plans for more social housing and employment rights.

There are words, and there are press releases.

But families who cannot afford lunches today are being asked to wait for strategies that, most probably, may not change the direction of their lives.

The fact that everybody is waiting is a policy outcome in itself – it normalises hardship.

It lets basic needs drift from the realm of public responsibility to the realm of charity.

It signals that hunger is tolerated so long as ministers can point to future plans on a calendar.

Nobody in the real world cares about future plans. We want to know what the government is doing now – 14 months after winning a general election – and why we aren’t already feeling relief from the pinch of hardship.

Why is this happening?

The answer is because choices have been made that shave cash out of household budgets and allow housing and wages to be decoupled from real living costs; because political calculations prize short-term optics over long-term social investment; because the safety net has been ripped to shreds.

What would end this drift into a “new normal” of hardship and deprivation for millions?

The measures are well known and practical:

• Scrap the two-child limit. This is a direct way to remove a policy-created driver of child and family poverty. The money flows straight into household budgets on essentials, immediately reducing the need for emergency food parcels.

• Raise benefit levels to meet real living costs. Universal Credit and legacy payments have not kept pace with the prices people face. Restoring benefits to a level that covers food, heating, rent and transport would stop many families from sliding into food bank dependence.

• Rebuild proper crisis support. National, predictable crisis grants that are accessible and adequately funded would stop emergencies from becoming permanent dependency.

• Invest in social housing at scale. High housing costs are the single largest drain on household budgets. Affordable social housing would free up income for food, childcare and transport.

• Raise wages and end insecure contracts. Precarious work and low pay mean that people in work still need food banks. Stronger workers’ rights, enforcement of existing laws and a meaningful minimum wage would reduce working poverty.

• Fix punitive welfare design. Cliff edges, sanctions and benefit tapering work against family stability. Replace punitive measures with stabilising support that helps people into secure work rather than pushing them deeper into hardship. Why not try a Universal Basic Income?

These measures are not wishful thinking. They are targeted fixes that return money directly to households, and the cash would then be spent locally — on shops, cafés and services — boosting local economies and preserving jobs.

Poverty imposes avoidable costs on the NHS, on education, and on employment productivity. Estimates vary, but inequality and poverty cost the UK tens of billions of pounds every year; investing in people reduces those losses.

There are practical, politically possible funding choices: re-balancing tax to take away reliefs that primarily benefit the wealthy, cracking down on avoidance, and prioritising capital spending towards housing and services that pay social as well as financial dividends.

As ever with Starmer’s lacklustre Labour government, the issue is not a lack of resources so much as a lack of political will.

If ministers insist on costs being the barrier, then we must force them to face the facts they are ignoring: the two-child cap has a headline cost, but the alternative is the long, slow cost of chronic ill health, lost education, diminished productivity and the social damage that follows.

That is what Starmer and his ministers are forcing on us – just as the Tories did before them.

Scrapping a punitive policy and stabilising incomes is an investment — not charity.

But then, this is not the story of a charity. It is about the failure of government policy to protect those whose labour the United Kingdom relies upon.

The government can and should act now. It can remove the two-child cap, raise incomes, and build affordable homes.

Those moves would not just ease hunger today; they would reduce long-term public costs and strengthen the economy.

The Trussell Trust has sounded the alarm, and I know the alarm is real because I am living the reality it describes.

A decorated manifesto and a fine speech are worthless to someone whose next meal is uncertain.

Ministers can either choose headlines or choose people.

If they choose the former, this “new normal” will become permanent.

The child poverty strategy and the autumn budget will tell us what Starmer prefers.

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