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Friday June 16 2017
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The Church of Scotland has called for action on child hunger, after a new UNICEF report found that children in the UK are more likely to go hungry than those in other European countries.
The report found that 1 in 5 children in the United Kingdom are at risk of hunger compared to an average of 1 in 8 in other wealthy countries. The UK scored 34th out of 41 countries on the report’s food insecurity index.
The Rev Martin Johnstone, Secretary of the Church of Scotland’s Church and Society Council, and chair of the Scottish Government’s Independent Working Group on Food Poverty, said: “It is a scandal that an estimated 1 in 5 children in the UK are at risk of going hungry because of poverty. These are not simply statistics; they represent children with names, faces and all too often empty stomachs.
“Foodbanks, breakfast clubs and community meals do a spectacular job trying to alleviate this crisis but we need to recognise that the fundamental problem is about the lack of money that families have to feed themselves.
“It is estimated that increasing child benefit by £5 per week would mean that 30,000 less children in Scotland would have to grow up in poverty. Surely this is the sort of bold and courageous leadership that these children need and deserve.”
End Hunger UK, a coalition which includes Church Action on Poverty and other charities working for food justice, is calling on the Government to improve provision of free meals for children during school holidays – and to start measuring the scale of food insecurity in the UK.
Josh Fenton-Glynn, End Hunger Campaign Manager, said: “It is simply not acceptable that 1 in 10 children in our country lives with severe food insecurity. We are only finding this out now because our government refuse to measure the level of food insecurity – and it is increasingly clear that government policies are causing the number to rise. With school holidays coming up, more families will be struggling to feed their children. Locally and nationally, we need action to tackle holiday hunger and other forms of food insecurity.”
Post Tags: hunger
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