Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of food insecurity amongst (a) primary and (b) secondary school children in (i) Coventry North East constituency, (ii) Coventry, (iii) the West Midlands and (iv) England (A) in each of the last five years and (B) during the covid-19 outbreak.

We have not made an assessment of this kind. Issues of food insecurity amongst school children fall within the remit of the Department for Education so assessments such as this would be their responsibility.

We take the issue of food security 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. These questions remain in the survey and will allow us to track food security over time. Statistics on Household Food Security from the Family Resources Survey for financial year 20/21 have a provisional release date of March 2022, subject to the usual quality assurance.

National and regional statistics on the number of food insecure households are published annually in the “Family Resources Survey” publication. Statistics on levels of food insecure households in the UK , covering 2019/20, can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2019-to-2020