Theresa May's tawdry legacy is thousands of children going hungry during the summer holidays

Liz Truss says Brexit and Boris Johnson will offer us a new personal freedom. For thousands of families this summer, the only freedom they will be enjoying is deciding which foodbank to use

Theresa May’s premiership will come to an end next week, just as the school holidays are beginning. Those who benefit from free school meals will in many cases be relying on the kindness of strangers to ensure that their children do not go hungry when they are not at school.

During the summer break, families who are entitled to free school meals have the additional burden of having to feed them at lunchtime and also pay for prohibitively expensive child care costs if they are in work.

The Trussell Trust charity, the biggest provider of foodbanks in the UK, reported that in 2018 they gave out 87,496 food parcels in the summer holidays – a rise of 20 per cent from 2017. One in three of the emergency food parcels that the Trust delivers goes to families with children.

This is a terrible legacy for a prime minister who spoke of “burning injustices” when she made her first speech on the steps of Downing Street in 2016. Food poverty and children going hungry are widespread problems across the UK, even in areas generally considered to be prosperous. In Guildford, where I went to school, a local council report highlighted examples of children going hungry in the winter holidays and parents choosing to pay for food instead of heating their homes.

So how have we got here, with a government claims that we have record low unemployment?

One of the biggest culprits is the botched implementation of Universal Credit. Claimants are made to wait five weeks for an initial payment and any advanced payments are recouped over 12 months. The Conservative slogan is “building a country that works for everyone”. Given that some women are being driven to sex work to make ends meet for their families while they wait for Universal Credit to come through, this government is utterly detached from reality.

Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, said this week that this wait is “really hard” to cope. So why, until now, has she done nothing to fix the issue?

Another cause of the hunger crisis is the benefits sanction process, which docks claimants' benefit payments for bizarre transgressions such as turning up a few minutes late for a meeting with Job Centre staff. The government’s own research, from 2018, concluded that there is no evidence that the sanctions actually work to change behaviour. However, to quote Theresa May, nothing has changed as a result.

Cuts to local government have also helped pile further misery to families on their uppers. When the Conservatives ran my local council, Richmond, the party imposed a minimum council tax payment of 15 per cent, except for those on some disability benefits. The Tories they argued that they could no longer afford to reduce council tax bills for the most vulnerable, yet the consequences for some were extreme financial hardship.

At the last election, the Conservative Party abandoned its promise to replace universal free school meals for the first three years of primary school with another pledge to instead provide free school breakfasts for all primary school pupils. The school breakfast idea had worked out at seven pence per serving – a meal not even worth the plate it was served on.

Brexiteer MPs keep evoking the blitz spirit when it comes to Brexit. However they will not have to worry about the rising cost of putting food on the table for their families if we crash out of the EU with no deal. Many will go back to lucrative private sector jobs even if they are turfed out by their constituents at the next election. The same cannot be said of the car plant workers of Ford and Honda who are already losing their jobs.

As Liz Truss introduced Boris Johnson at the final Tory leadership hustings yesterday she talked about the importance of “personal freedom”. For thousands of families this summer, the only personal freedom they will have is deciding which foodbank to use, or which charity to turn to, in order to feed their children properly.