If Tories want to help the hungry, here’s what they should do

Photograph: Andy Buchanan/PA

While Marcus Rashford’s rallying cry around the need to raise awareness and take-up of Healthy Start vouchers is incredibly helpful, the remainder of your article suggests that increased awareness alone might not be sufficient if full take-up of the vouchers is to be achieved (Marcus Rashford urges health staff to spread word about food vouchers, 4 August).

The government almost certainly holds the information it needs to identify which families are among the quarter of a million eligible beneficiaries who are not taking up the vouchers. Ministers could therefore overcome all the hurdles that stand in the way of take-up – including stigma, bureaucratic complexity and language barriers – by introducing an automatic registration system that swings the pendulum from “opt in” to “opt out”. This could lead to an additional £1m worth of vouchers being received by the poorest families each week, thereby reducing food insecurity and saving local authorities the resources currently required to make a decent fist of the opt-in process.
Andrew Forsey
National director, Feeding Britain

• We must hope that Steve Baker MP and his colleagues – including six former work and pensions secretaries who are opposed to the change – are able to persuade the government not to cut universal credit (Johnson faces rebellion over ‘intolerable’ hunger and poverty in home counties, 1 August; Editorial, 2 August). According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the proposed £20 a week reduction will impose the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since 1948. Even with the top-up, UK provision is poor by European standards, universal credit (UC) being worth only 18% of previous earnings, compared with 70% for the equivalent benefit in Spain and 60% in Germany.

At Exeter food bank, we anticipate that the cut will bring more people to our door. This is because there are now an additional one million people on UC nationally than before the pandemic. Many of them will never have had to live on so little and they are now being expected to live on £20 per week less. Working families with low incomes make up the majority of the families who will be affected by the cuts to UC and to working tax credit.

We will be campaigning alongside the Trussell Trust to #KeepTheLifeline. I urge readers – and Marcus Rashford – to join us.
Jeff Skinner
Exeter, Devon

• As an evangelical Christian, Steve Baker could reasonably describe his late conversion to opposing the planned cuts to universal credit as a clear case of “better one sinner who repents”, but a more compelling version is that he spent the five post-referendum years running a determined campaign to ensure that the UK left the EU rather than worrying about anything else. And, with his constituency 281st on a list of 317 areas on a deprivation index, it suggests that the “squeezed middle” that Ed Miliband spoke of 10 years ago – to much ridicule from Baker and his colleagues – has expanded very considerably.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon

• Steve Baker says: “I’m determined to get to the heart of this problem”. He need look no further than to his fellow Tory MPs for their ideological answer. That Mr Baker finds the reasons for the current levels of poverty and hunger difficult to understand is dispiriting and says it all.
Joe Shackles
Rayleigh, Essex

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