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Poverty levels
THE 'LIVING STANDARDS OUTLOOK 2023' REPORT BY THE RESOLUTION FOUNDATION:
• 75% of UK adults reported they are trying to cut back on overall spending. (The Resolution Foundation, 2023)
• The lowest income groups (families earning under £11,650 a year) spend 21% of their total household budget on food and non-alcoholic beverages
• 43% of people on benefits said they are not confident about their financial stability.
• In Nov 22, 28% of adults said they could not afford to eat balanced meals
• 23% of those receiving means-tested or disability benefits are severely food insecure which is a 4% rise in these statistics from pre-pandemic
• 27% of adults report using their savings for daily expenses such as food, and others have said they have sold things they would have been reluctant to sell or have cancelled bills such as internet or insurance
• Finally, 47% of people face emotional distress, however, this number goes up to 64% when that person is on state benefits
QUALITY OF LIFE:
This section looks at the quality of life in the UK with a 45% personal income tax rate, vs Iceland which has a slightly higher tax rate of 46.2%(Bunn, 2022) and aimed to evaluate how this small increase could make a difference.
• Iceland's life expectancy is 84, but the UK's is 82 (as of 2022)
• In the UK you’re 75% more likely to die during childbirth
• Iceland spends 7.6% of its total GDP on education, but the UK spends only 5.2% of its total GDP on education (as of 2018)
• In Iceland, 8.8% live below the poverty line. In the UK, 20% of people are in poverty (according to 2021 statistics). out of the 13.4 million in poverty, 3.9 million are children which means 27% of all children in the UK are living in poverty (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2022)
• In Iceland, 3.6% of adults are unemployed as of 2019. In the UK this number is 3.2% as of 2019, moreover, people in the UK are 12.4% more likely to be unemployed (My Life Elsewhere, 2022)
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HEALTH BENEFITS
Kids on packed lunches consume a lower-quality diet filled with high levels of sugar and sodium etc. FSM have higher protein and fibre which help to speed up recovery after an injury, lower cholesterol, help digestion and also boost satiety hormones which make you less hungry during the day, which leads to fewer obese children and less strain on the NHS (Evans et al., 2015). Childhood obesity actually costs the NHS £4.2 billion a year as almost 20% of children in primary schools are obese (Royal Society For Public Health, 2019).
Benefits of universal free school meals
FEED THE FUTURE CAMPAIGN
Feed the Future is a campaign led by The Food Foundation which is a charity that explores food policy and tries to make healthy diets affordable and accessible for all. They are proposing that FSM should be extended to more children and released a survey showing the overwhelming support from the general public for this. Results from this survey show that 87% of the English public believes the Government has a lot or some responsibility for helping children. Moreover, 72% of the English public think that FSM should be universal and not means-tested. The Feed the Future campaign is led by the Food Foundation but has a multitude of supporters, including Urban Health who commissioned accounting firm PWC to draw up a cost-benefit analysis which can be seen on the next slide (The Food Foundation, 2022).
THE SCHOOL MEAL PROJECT
A study in Norway was carried out in 2015 where a group of sixth graders were given FSM in a project called “The School Meal Project”. They were interviewed in 2015 and then in 2020 to recall their experience and what they gained from it. One particular benefit from this study is that universal FSM helps to create equality, if it was just given to poor students then that can generate stigma and bullying. In this study teachers were said to have noticed the “embarrassment of children with poor quality packed lunches”, and the students in this study valued the social equality aspect as highly as the food. Furthermore, it helps to improve the quality of diet.
Parents on low income buy stuff they know their kids will eat; if a kid tries something new at school it’s a free way of getting them to try new things, plus kids were influenced with eating with their friends and were more likely to try new things. Finally, students in this study said they had more energy, enhanced ability to concentrate and improved learning experiences (Illøkken et al., 2021).
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