Abstract
Food aid has become a high-profile component of the de facto UK welfare safety net over the past decade, alongside more widespread increases in food insecurity and poverty. This study provides new evidence of how different types of food aid affect households’ living standards and food security, in the context of their broader resources and livelihood strategies, while also contributing to more comprehensive income measurement and analysis with relevance for poverty statistics and food insecurity monitoring.Forty-seven people using food banks or community meals in the London Borough of Southwark participated in completed semi-structured interviews, covering baseline periods at different points between November 2016 and January 2019 and follow-ups a year later for some interviewees. The interviews piloted a new, hybrid approach bringing together ground-breaking ‘household economy’ methods developed in the Global South – primarily the Individual Household Method – with questions on income, costs and experiences of subjective food insecurity from established large-scale UK surveys. The household economy methods allow for analysis of more informal incomes (including ‘food income’) and longer-term patterns. Minimum Income Standard budgets were used to consider the adequacy of the incomes recorded, and open-ended questions gave additional context and meaning. This new approach to measuring poverty, conceptualised as the Enhanced Family Budget method, involved the development of bespoke ‘LiveliFoods’© software.
The research found that almost all of the families’ total resources were far below a minimum socially-acceptable standard of living. Food aid helped to reduce essential costs to varying extents and could be vital in providing at least some food to eat; it also sometimes involved additional emotional or practical support. Yet food alone could not fill deficits of the magnitude commonly observed. Changes in income from benefits and jobs provided far more transformative impacts. Positive contributions of food aid can also be diminished by unreliability, stigma and differences from desired consumption; with some exceptions and caveats, people using food aid services generally preferred the idea of having an option to receive equivalent cash assistance.
This study also demonstrates the diversity of food services in London, as well as much variety in people’s broader circumstances and usage of the services. These are shown to have a range of effects on living standards.
Methodologically, the more comprehensive resource and cost data quantifies many livelihood aspects which are often overlooked in other survey data. Some informal incomes are too socially unpalatable to count towards official poverty measures, representing as they do people’s coping strategies which may be better monitored in other indicators. Yet incorporating a wider range of essential costs into this study’s analysis proved how important these are for understanding people’s livelihoods, alongside other improvements to how resource levels are measured. Many of the highest net incomes, measured by conventional means, for the families turning to food aid were found to be considerably overestimated.
| Date of Award | 1 Nov 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | David Green (Supervisor), Celia Petty (Supervisor) & Deborah Potts (Supervisor) |