Cllr Jim Dickson is the Cabinet Member for Healthier Communities (job-share), and a councillor in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction ward.

Lambeth has voted to become a Right to Food borough. But we are all mortified that it should be necessary for us to do so. In 2010, we had an NHS which worked, many fewer children in poverty than we do now, and we had no food banks. We had no need for emergency food aid. Our residents were living longer lives than had been the case 10 years earlier at the start of the last Labour government.

Then came Tory austerity – a brutal assault on the incomes, the vital services, and the health and wellbeing of the least well off in our communities. And it needs to be said that the assault took place with the full support of the Liberal Democrats. They were the Tories willing accomplices in that coalition government. From the bedroom tax to the Lansley vandalism of the health service, to the cuts in benefits for the poorest, they voted for all of it. The result is 42% of children Lambeth are currently growing up in poverty.

Two years after the Tories launched their attack on living standards in Lambeth, the first foodbank appeared and since then it’s been necessary to create – with our voluntary sector partners – a network of food support across our borough, working with great organisations like Healthy Living Platform, Brixton People’s Kitchen, Lambeth Larder and Clapham Park, Vauxhall, and Norwood and Brixton foodbanks.

This wave of hunger and poor diet has afflicted too many families. As the recent London Assembly report Growing Hungry launched by our excellent Assembly Member Marina Ahmad makes clear, hunger leaves in its wake heart disease, respiratory conditions, diabetes, depression and widening health inequalities in our communities.

That’s why Lambeth Labour have put in place our Food Poverty and Insecurity Action Plan, with advice from our amazing Lambeth Food Partnership with a range of successful initiatives:
• Getting emergency food out to 40,000 families during COVID
• Ensuring the families of 15,000 children on low incomes get food during the holidays
• Our fridge and freezer fund ensuring that fresh fruit and vegetables is a key part all food support
• Our community shops and pantries which we are now using to wrap around health and advice services
• Our work to ensure that what is provided is appropriate for our African Caribbean, Portuguese, Latinx and other communities
• Our work with the Alexandra Rose Charity providing healthy food vouchers for children

Big thanks to the Brixton market stall holders amongst others who accept the vouchers and help keep our families healthy and to all the volunteers and staff who deliver these programmes across our borough day in day out. It is these steps – including key anti-poverty measures such as insisting on payment of London Living Wage – which earlier this year saw the UK Sustain judge Lambeth to be the number one London borough for fighting food poverty.

But that’s not enough. We need government to help us to do more. As we declare Lambeth a Right To Food borough – and we face this winter’s unprecedented cost of living squeeze which will make levels of hunger in our borough worse – we do so with no illusions. The Right to Food cannot be a substitute for the steps needed to raise the incomes of the least well off by rises in pay, big increases in Universal Credit and the creation of an inclusive economy.

But in doing so we are calling on the government to fund additional measures which would make a massive difference including funding free school meals for all primary school children, financial support for new efforts to create a network of community kitchens and to help us promote access to even more land suitable for community food growing. It will almost certainly require a Labour government to end the level of hunger we are seeing in our communities. But in the meantime, nothing will stop us pressing ahead with our work as a council an NHS and a wider community to ensure that no family, no child, no older or disabled person should ever go hungry in our borough again.

Cllr Jim Dickson