Avoiding holiday hunger this summer.

Summer’s here, and for already tired parents across Havering that means more time to spend with their kids, but also a lot more pressure attempting to juggle work and finances. 

For some it will be exceptionally difficult, as a June 2024 report from the End Child Poverty Coalition and the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University revealed that 17,896 children in Havering are living in relative or absolute poverty. Two-thirds of teachers surveyed by The Felix Project fear that a child in their class will go hungry this summer.

What’s available for Havering families?

1. School Meal Holiday Scheme:
   • For children receiving benefit-related free school meals, this scheme provides £15 per week to help keep them fed during the holidays. For now, due to loss of funding, this will be the last year of the scheme. Only a subset of those children in poverty, who have met the criteria of the scheme and applied, will receive support.
   • Details and Application
     
2. Holiday Activities and Food Programme (HAF):
   • Centrally funded by the Department for Education, participating organisations in the HAF programme will put on events until the end of August where each child receives a nutritious meal. Children eligible for benefit-related free school meals can apply. Limited places are also available for referrals from local agencies.
   • Details and Application
     
3. Emergency Assistance Scheme:
   • For urgent financial needs, this scheme originally started during the pandemic, may be able to help.
   • Details and Application
     
4. Food Banks:
   • Food Banks are run by organisations such as the Trussell Trust, I can confirm that the Collier Row staff are lovely to work with. Food parcels can be provided to those who have been assessed and received a food voucher from bodies like Citizens Advice, Peabody, and the Havering Welfare Reform team. Information on getting assessed can be found on the Harold Hill Foodbank page below.
   • Harold Hill Foodbank Information
     
5. Additional Resources:
   • Websites like Money Saving Central and Money Saving Expert offer deals on food, tips to save on childcare costs, and affordable family activities.

Why this is important to me

While we had financial challenges, growing up in a single parent household, I never went without. No foreign holidays until much later than my classmates, but there was always food and a roof.

In 2019, I took a job with a key focus on food insecurity, calling for the government to make hunger history in the UK, and working with food waste charities and community food projects to provide them an audience with MPs and to pull together a conference in Newcastle. I also interviewed people whose children hugely benefited from breakfast clubs in North Warwickshire, and various community groups addressing poverty in Bristol.

While living out in Germany, I became a share-holding member of a cooperative supermarket, working with other members to source sustainably grown produce for our community. On several visits back to see family and friends in the UK, I’d fit in a shift at one of Havering’s food banks.

What we need now

It is not acceptable that there are people in our community choosing between eating for themselves or feeding their kids. It’s also not acceptable that this becomes a permanent, rather than temporary set of circumstances.

The most immediate thing that could be done to prevent hunger in this country is to ensure children do not go hungry because of how many siblings they have.

The Green Party has called for the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, taking 2.6m children out of poverty by the end of the next parliament. This would improve their ability to concentrate in school, contribute to their overall well-being, and help them to develop into adults with the qualifications and the positive childhood experiences they need to be their best.

That’s the first step. The second is to address the direct transfer of wealth from those on lower and middle incomes to the wealthy which has worsened since the pandemic. Our recent manifesto sought to redress this with a wealth tax proposal, similar to that of Patriotic Millionaires and Tax Justice UK, carefully administered to ensure it is paid, but providing a cash injection to tackle Britain’s deep inequalities.

In the recent election, Greens also called for an expansion of the successful Sure Start centre model of children’s centres and adjacent support, which a 2019 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) study claimed had reduced the numbers of people taken to hospital, and saved millions of pounds for the NHS.

We also seek an expansion of free childcare for early years, following discussions with the sector, to 35 hours per week after 9 months. This does not seem particularly revolutionary after living in Germany, where paid shared parental leave and state subsidies for child services are more generous, and childcare is some of the most affordable in Europe.

Locally, I’m keen that we fight to maintain funding streams for programmes – and our food banks – that help keep kids fed, and would love to hear from individuals and groups that want to provide community grown food.—

Mark Whiley is a Green Party campaigner for Squirrels Heath.

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