This week, Stroud MP David Drew discusses food insecurity.

THERE is increasing evidence that school holidays do not mean relaxed days for many.

‘Holiday hunger’ is a real issue, with children missing meals as families try to cope through the summer break. It’s just one aspect of food insecurity.

When my colleague Emma Lewell-Buck MP asked me to join 150 cross party MPs signing a letter to the Prime Minister urging her to support the forthcoming Food Insecurity Bill, I didn’t hesitate. I am increasingly concerned that reports from recent years are pointing to rising numbers of people going hungry in the UK.

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation estimated that as many as 8.4 million people in the UK are ‘food insecure’, meaning they don’t have reliable access to enough affordable nutritious food. The UN has also estimated that 10% of children in the UK are living in households affected by severe food insecurity.

Foodbanks have become an established norm in our towns, with 2,000 across the UK.

A report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Hunger estimated that three million children are at risk of being hungry in the school holidays.

This suggests a worrying trend and one which we must seek to reverse.

We need to understand the problem in order to be able to solve it, which is why I am supporting this Bill, which will have its second reading in Parliament in October.

It will allow the creation of a robust and reliable measure of food insecurity in the UK, and will enable questions about hunger to be added to the annual Living Costs and Food Survey already carried out.

This is a complex problem and a sad indication of the real struggles many people face.

We need the Government to take this seriously, and recognise that proper analysis is the first step to solving it.