SEVERE hardship in Britain is being “normalised”, the foodbank charity Trussell warns.

Its second Hunger in the UK report, published on Wednesday, suggests that 14.1 million people experienced food insecurity last year through a lack of money — a rise from 11.6 million in 2022, when the last survey was carried out.

The survey also found that 61 per cent of households that reported going without food did not obtain any form of charitable food support. Trussell defines food insecurity as “going without or cutting back on quality or quantity of food due to a lack of money”.

When asked why they had not sought such support, more than half (55 per cent) said that they did not feel that they should because they were not facing financial hardship. One third (32 per cent) did not think that they were in enough need, and one quarter (23 per cent) thought that others were in greater need.

People who are food-insecure have, at some point over the last year, run out of food and been unable to afford more, have reduced their meal size, eaten less, gone hungry, or lost weight, owing to lack of money. The broad structure and sequence of the questions used by Ipsos to assess food security for this research are the same as those used by the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

“There is no real path to tackling hunger without action on social security,” Sumi Rabindrakumar, head of policy and research at Trussell, said at a briefing on Monday. She pointed to “successive freezes and cuts”, alongside rises in the cost of food.

The charity is calling for the abolition of the two-child limit, estimating that this would lift 670,000 people out of “severe hardship”, including 470,000 children.

Introduced ten years ago, the cap means that households claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit and with a third or subsequent child born after 6 April 2017 can no longer receive additional amounts for these children. It has been consistently opposed by the Church of England’s bishops (News, 31 August)

So far, the Government has declined to remove the cap, despite calls from charities, faith leaders, Labour grandees, including Gordon Brown, and the Work and Pensions Committee. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that abolishing the limit would cost £2.5 billion in 2024-25, rising to £3.6 billion the following year. A YouGov poll conducted in 2024 found that 60 per cent of respondents — including half of the Labour voters — supported retaining the cap.

The director of policy at Trussell, Helen Barnard, cited work by the think tank More in Common on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. This found that support for the cap was “highly contingent on how the policy is framed”. Research has shown that presenting the question in the context that children deserve “the best possible start in life”, alongside a pledge to increase advice and support on budgeting or problem debt, increased public support for removing the cap.

The most “powerful frame” in favour of retaining the limit was responsibility. But this view was “mutable” in focus groups when the conversation turned to the many factors beyond parents’ control, such as illness or job loss, Ms Barnard said.

Ipsos had also conducted a separate survey of almost 4000 people who had been referred to a random sample of foodbanks in the Trussell network. It found that families at foodbanks were, on average, left with just £104 a week after housing costs — 17 per cent of the figure for the average UK household.

In addition, 30 per cent of those referred were in working households — up from 24 per cent in 2022. People in manual and service positions — such as bus drivers and care workers — were among the working people most likely to face hunger, despite having a job. “We see a lot of people who are doing shift work, agency work, zero-hours contracts,” Ms Barnard said.

The DWP reports that, in 2023-24, 7.5 million people (11 per cent) in the UK were in food-insecure households, up from seven per cent in 2021-22. This survey asks about people’s experience of food insecurity in the previous three months, while the Trussell/Ipsos survey asked about the past year.