“A Right to Food Act would establish clear duties on governments and public authorities to protect people’s access to adequate food.”
Ian Byrne MP wrote a piece for the Socialist Campaign Group’s 2026 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’. You can read the pamphlet in full below.
The UK Parliamentary Commission on the Right to Food that I founded in November 2025 presented its interim findings in Westminster in July.
After months of travelling the country, listening to people with lived experience, charities, businesses, academics, local authorities and frontline organisations, one conclusion has emerged with remarkable consistency. In one of the richest countries on Earth, hunger is not inevitable. It is a political choice.
Since launching the Commission, we have travelled from Liverpool to Newcastle, Belfast to Glasgow, Cardiff to London. Different places, but the same story was told everywhere. Parents skipping meals so their children can eat. Nurses and teachers, the very people who keep this country running, relying on food banks between shifts. Older people forced to choose between heating and eating. Disabled people describing a social security system that treats them with suspicion rather than dignity. Communities surrounded by farmland paying more for food than they can afford.
Wherever we went, we heard the same message. Britain does not have a food shortage. It has an income shortage.
The evidence leaves little room for doubt. People are not going hungry because they cannot cook, budget or make the “right choices”. They are going hungry because wages are too low, work is too insecure, housing costs are too high, and the social security system no longer guarantees the essentials of life.
When household budgets collapse, food becomes the flexible bill. Meals disappear first.
Yet amid all of this hardship, we also witnessed extraordinary kindness. Community food projects. Social supermarkets. School breakfast clubs. Community kitchens. Food banks staffed by volunteers determined that nobody in their neighbourhood should go hungry.
They are remarkable. But they should never have been asked to shoulder this burden alone. Charity can save lives. It cannot replace justice.
The scale of the challenge should shame us. Evidence presented to the Commission suggests that 14.1 million people across the United Kingdom now live in food-insecure households.
But statistics alone never tell the whole story. One conversation in London will stay with me forever.
A disabled former public sector worker told me she had barely switched her heating on for eight years because she simply could not afford both warmth and food. The only exception came on her birthday. For one hour. Because the cold had become unbearable. Nobody should have to treat warmth as an annual luxury.
Just last year, the United Nations concluded that Britain is failing to meet its obligations on the rights to food, housing and adequate social security. That should stop every politician in their tracks.
Throughout the Commission’s evidence sessions we heard repeatedly that hunger is about far more than empty stomachs. It is about dignity. About parents carrying guilt because they cannot provide. About children trying to learn while hungry. About older people withdrawing from society because they are ashamed. About disabled people being forced to fight a system that should be protecting them.
I’ve never accepted the argument that ending hunger is something Britain cannot afford. The evidence shows precisely the opposite. The investment needed to begin ending food insecurity is a fraction of what Britain already spends living with its consequences.
Every year, the consequences of unhealthy diets and food insecurity cost this country an estimated £268 billion. Around £92 billion of that falls directly on public budgets through the NHS, social care and welfare.
Britain is already paying for failure. We pay through rising NHS costs, poorer educational outcomes, lower productivity, greater pressure on councils and charities, and lives diminished by unnecessary hardship.
We choose to pay for the consequences instead of preventing the causes.
Yet the evidence also shows that overcoming all this is not an impossible challenge. The Commission’s proposed programme to begin ending food insecurity would cost around £6 billion a year — less than 0.5% of public spending — while generating an estimated £100 billion in wider economic and social benefits over the next two decades.
The question is no longer whether we can afford to act. It is whether we can afford not to. Feeding children is not the expensive option. Continuing with hunger is
A new Prime Minister now has the opportunity to choose a different path.
The Commission’s work continues, but the evidence already points towards one central conclusion. Britain needs a Right to Food. Not as an aspiration. Not as another strategy. Not as charity. But as a legal guarantee.
A Right to Food Act would establish clear duties on governments and public authorities to protect people’s access to adequate food, backed by accountability, measurable progress and the voices of those with lived experience.
Alongside that framework, government must ensure that work genuinely provides a route out of poverty, that social security covers essential living costs, that children receive the support they need and that communities have the resources to build lasting local solutions.
This should never have been a party-political issue. I did not help establish this Commission to advance one political party over another. I did it because no child should go hungry in one of the richest countries in the world.
Hunger does not discriminate. An empty cupboard does not carry a party political label. Families are not interested in political point-scoring. They want the dignity of knowing they can put food on the table.
One witness in Northumberland said something I will never forget. “Don’t call us deprived communities. We’ve been asset-stripped.” That single sentence captures decades of political choices that have hollowed out communities while expecting them to survive on resilience alone.
The new Prime Minister has a choice. The evidence has been heard. The economic case is compelling. The moral case is overwhelming. Hunger is not inevitable. It is a political choice. Political choices can be changed.
The Government has the opportunity and the responsibility to make a different choice.
Because history will not judge us by the wealth our country created. It will judge us by whether, in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, we allowed millions of our fellow citizens to go hungry when we had both the means and the power to stop it.
- Ian Byrne is the MP for Liverpool West Derby. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram and X.
- You can read the SCG pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’ in full here. The foreword says that “We hope this contributes to a debate across the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider movement about the political programme needed to deliver the change people voted for, to build a better future for our communities and to prevent the rise of a Trump-style government here in Britain.“
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