Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will publish data on the number of welfare benefit claimants who use food banks.

Food banks are independent charitable organisations and there is no consistent and accurate measure of food bank usage. We take the issue of food insecurity seriously, which is why we added internationally used food security questions to the Family Resources Survey in 19/20 and published the data in March this year.

In addition, from April 2021 we introduced a set of questions into the Family Resources Survey (FRS) on food bank usage. The first results of these questions are expected to be published in March 2023 subject to usual quality assurance.