Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to help ensure that people in food poverty have a healthy and balanced diet.

The Government is committed to reducing poverty and supporting low-income families. We will spend over £242bn through the welfare system in 2022/23 including £108bn on people of working age. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is continuing the work begun by Public Health England to explore options to assess the cost of a healthy balanced diet in response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Food, Poverty, Health, and the Environment report 'Hungry for change: fixing the failures in food' (July 2020). Through the Healthy Food Schemes, the Government provides a nutritional safety net to those families who need it the most. The three Healthy Food Schemes (Healthy Start, the Nursery Milk Scheme and the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme) together help more than three million children. A balanced diet is rich in fruit and vegetables, beans, pulses and wholegrain starchy carbohydrates. It can also include dairy, fish and meat which are valuable sources of many nutrients important for human health. The Government encourages everyone to have a healthy balanced diet in line with the UK's healthy eating model, the Eatwell Guide. A study by Scarborough et al (2016) analysed the cost of achieving a diet in line with the Eatwell Guide and concluded that although achieving the UK dietary recommendations would require substantial changes to the current average diet, these changes would not lead to significant changes in the price of the diet. The diet in line with the Eatwell Guide cost £5.99 per adult per day, which was very similar to the cost of the current diet in the UK at £6.02 per adult per day.