A year ago, single mother Aida Voskian, 51, was suffering from depression brought on by suffocating personal debts: “You worried whether you could switch the heating on because you couldn’t afford the heating bill that month,” she says. Voskian, who works as a mealtime supervisor and part-time carer, said she always scraped the money together to feed her daughter Amelia, age nine. But making ends meet was touch and go, particularly during holiday periods, when free school meals were not available.
Life was about “survival” and there was no money for trips or treats. Her predicament, she felt, robbed her daughter of the freedoms enjoyed by many of her peers during holiday periods, and she experienced overwhelming guilt and shame: “It’s about not being able to do what you need to do for your child.”
Things changed after Voskian was referred to a scheme near her home in Barnet, north London, run by the Make Lunch charity. There, on weekdays during the summer holidays, she and Amelia would join other families for a hot meal. There were play activities for the children and a chance for parents to share problems. It took the pressure off. “It was a lifeline,” says Voskian, who has since become a volunteer with the scheme.
Make Lunch is one of a handful of charities, community groups and local authorities responding to what they see as a growing problem of “holiday hunger” experienced by children from families grappling with cost of living pressures: low wages, insecure work, benefit cuts and delays, and the running-down of community facilities through spending cuts.
So far in 2014, its volunteers have served over 8,000 meals to over 1,462 children in 38 kitchens, from Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight. It’s an achievement, acknowledges Rachel Warwick, a former teacher who founded the charity three years ago, but it represents only a tiny fraction of the 4m children who live in poverty in the UK.
John Vincent, a businessman, government advisor and co-author of the government-commissioned school food plan, called for government action to tackle the growing problem of hunger and lack of social and leisure opportunities faced by children of low-income families outside term time. “The primary aim is that no child goes hungry, but it is also about enrichment and opportunity for children to do creative things during the holiday.”
There is little in the way of hard data to measure the extent of holiday hunger, and, an all-party group of MPs and peers claim, little government appetite for researching the problem. According to a survey of teachers by the Trussell trust and Kelloggs published in August, an estimated one in eight children don’t get enough to eat during the holidays, while nearly one in five families struggle to feed their children.
Even where children from struggling families are eating – often because their parents are going without – the nutritional quality of the food can be poor. “If you are [a child] living on biscuits, which are cheap, you are not necessarily hungry,” says Caroline Wolhuter of the Holiday Kitchen scheme, “but it impacts on your cognitive development, wellbeing and school readiness.”
Although hunger and nutrition are at the core of the projects, campaigners say they also perform a valuable early-intervention role, reducing financial strain on struggling families before they descend into crisis. Like food banks, meal schemes are an indicator of the pressures facing low-income families in the era of austerity.
Co-ordinated holiday hunger schemes are commonplace in the US, where the federally funded Summer Food Service Programme has coordinated the provision of free healthy meals to children and teenagers in socially and economically deprived areas since 1975.
Lindsay Graham, a school food adviser and the author of a recent report on holiday hunger, says aspects of the US model should be adopted by the UK government, which she says should fund holiday meal and enrichment provision targeted at socially deprived neighbourhoods where free school meals levels are above 40%.
However, charities warn that that while welcome, holiday hunger provision represents a sticking-plaster response to deeper problems. “Far too many children are hungry on a regular basis, and provision of nutritious meals outside term time for children eligible for free school meals would be extremely welcome. But there are other underlying problems, with family budgets being hammered by cuts to benefits and tax credits, stagnating wages and rising prices, housing and childcare costs,” says Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group.
“We can put a stop to hunger among UK children, but it needs urgent action from politicians of all parties to tackle these problems at root.”
