Feeding Liverpool is the city of Liverpool’s food alliance, connecting and supporting community food spaces across the city with the aim of ending food insecurity and ensuring that everyone has access to good food. We work with organisations which provide crisis and longer-term food support for residents in Liverpool. Many of the people using these spaces have a disability and are affected by low incomes. As a result, our network is concerned by many of the changes being proposed in the Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper.

In 2024, Feeding Liverpool and the University of Liverpool School of Law and Justice published the Without Access to Justice Report. Case studies from across Liverpool’s Community Food Spaces illustrated how poor wages and working conditions, an unsupportive welfare system and inadequate resources to legal protection have led to people requiring support from foodbanks and pantries. Meanwhile, food insecurity itself was shown to be a key driver of physical and mental ill-health.

Unfortunately, in the year since the Without Access to Justice Report was launched, little has changed. Research from Trussel (formerly Trussel Trust) that was published in March this year has shown that 43% of people claiming Universal Credit and disability benefits have skipped meals to keep up with other essential costs in the last three months.

Emergency and community food support organisations are already under immense strain; many feel that statutory services rely on charities and the third sector to provide a role which the state is not fulfilling. Further to this, any government action which increases the need for foodbanks goes directly against their manifesto pledge to reduce food insecurity. In this context, we would ask the government: what assessments have been made to ensure that a reduction in income for people accessing disability-related benefits will not push more people into food insecurity?

There are several points that are of particualr concern in the current proposals:

• Restructuring PIP to a purely out-of-work benefit means that individuals will be assessed based on the impact of their disability on their daily living, not on their capacity to work. This could have a particular impact on entitlements for disabled people with mental ill health who often can complete everyday tasks (with structured support). The current proposals will reduce the income of thousands of people who are receiving PIP.
• Whilst the merger of JSA and ESA into a single Unemployment Insurance will increase the amount of money that some people will receive, it may also impose further conditionality and time frames on others.
• Denying the Health Element top-up of Universal Credit to under 22s could exacerbate youth poverty, given that people under 25 already receive lower rates of Universal Credit than older adults.
• The top-up will also be reduced for new claimants – from £97 to £50 per week by 2026/2027 – with a total cut of more than £2,000 a year.

There are some welcome changes proposed in the Green Paper, including ending reassessments for disabled people in cases where they will never be able to work and introducing a ‘Right to Try’ to protect income and review status during transitional work phases. However, more detail is required as to how the £1 billion investment in employment, health and skills support will work.

The Without Access to Justice Report illustrates how the proliferation of low-paid, insecure work is, in of itself, a cause of stress and disability-related benefit claims. Many of the people who require community food support are currently in work themselves. Punitive sanctions, disciplinarian conditionality and pushing people into poor quality jobs will neither improve people’s health, nor their food security.

Anybody can be vulnerable to food insecurity. Therefore, a welfare system and public services that reflect this are needed to ensure that people’s basic needs are met at times of difficulty. Action is also needed to secure living-wage jobs, with a strong framework for employee rights. Feeding Liverpool would welcome any government action which increases people’s incomes and reduces the needs for foodbanks and community food spaces to help support squeezed household budgets.

Feeding Liverpool reiterate the recommendations outlines in the Without Access to Justice Report:

• Include people with experince of poverty in the design of all policy and procedure that affects them
• Stop requiring benefit claimants to take up jobs on zero-hour contracts
• End the use of sanctions
• Ensure that Universal Credit is generous enough to provide an adequate standard of living

The full report and list of recommendations can be found here.

Professor Lydia Hayes, University of Liverpool:

Restricting access to PIP is an attack on disabled workers. It will make it harder for the government to achieve its goal of getting more out-of-work disbaled people into work. Restricting access to PIP will leave disabled workers without in-work support, increase their need for foodbanks and damage their mental health. The government has committed to reduce the UK’s record levels of insecure work becase, as our research has shown, food insecurity, disability and insecure work are intimately connected. Reducing the security of workers who are already insecure due to low income risks making a bad situation even worse.

KIm Johnson, MP for Liverpool Riverside:

Three quarters of the people who claim Universal Credit and Disability have gone without essential items in the past six months. The £5 billion cut is likely to make that worse for them.

Kate Griffiths, All Saints Stoneycroft Foodbank:

We are going to have people starting to come to the foodbank who have had their mobility payments either stopped or reduced, we are going to end up with people turning up who have had to spend money on getting things adapted within the home or on keeping warm. These are all things that your disability payments would normally cover – so therefore they are not going to have money left over for food.

Dave Kelly, CEO of Daisy Inclusive UK:

Every couple of years, the government tries to claw back money from the most deprived, disabled and vulnerable in our community. In addition to poverty, hunger and loneliness, the extra worry of welfare cutbacks is like the sword of Damocles hanging over them, with the uncertainty of where the next hot meal will come from.