“When I was a child, and we had paid our rent and bills but had run out of money, I was sometimes sent by my mother to our parish priest to ask for the loan of a pound to buy some basic food, to get us to payday, a day or two away. I can still taste the searing shame of standing on his doorstep admitting that in our home, there was no bread, or milk, or eggs left. It would take me two decades to learn, through the social mobility ladder that was then free university education, that the fault in that scenario was not our own.”

Jill, food bank volunteer

Why is it so much easier to believe in people going hungry overseas, rather than here at home? The reality of hunger in the United Kingdom is widely unacknowledged. Food insecurity ranges from people simply worrying about being able to afford food to people being “too poor to eat”, and going without meals for days at a time.

It’s hard to establish reliable information about the extent of hunger in the UK. The best recent evidence we have was published by the Food Foundation in 2016. It suggested that in 2014, 8.4 million people in the UK were struggling to put food on the table, with more than half of these regularly going a whole day without eating.