“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. Some of us need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.”

As a humanitarian for the past decade, this quote from Desmond Tutu strikes a deep chord with me. After years of pulling people from the river, it’s time to go upstream - and build a safety net in the UK that restores dignity, and ensures everyone can meet their basic needs, including food.

From Food Banks to Food Drops

I first volunteered at Hackney Foodbank, an independent charity and member of the Trussell Trust Foodbank Network, in 2013. At the time, it was housed in a small warehouse in Upper Clapton, down a dark, damp alleyway. A handful of volunteers gathered a few times a week to welcome clients who, by exchanging a referral slip, would receive a couple of carrier bags filled with dried foods. The contents were chosen by volunteers based on whatever was available on the shelves.

I often wondered how clients would manage to make a decent meal out of the random assortment of tins and pasta we handed them. Then they would make their way back down the alley, sometimes travelling an hour or more each way on public transport, often with young children in tow, or on crutches, or leaning on walking sticks.

It was around the same time I began my career in the humanitarian sector with international aid organisations. The World Food Programme’s traditional response to food insecurity has been to provide food directly - bags of flour, salt, and bottles of oil - to stave off hunger. In 2014, while working with an INGO in South Sudan responding to the civil war taking place, I witnessed a “food drop”, which is exactly as it sounds: boxes of supplies literally dropped from aeroplanes into areas too remote or marshy for lorries or landing strips. Staff and volunteers then collected the boxes and distributed the rations to long queues of registered recipients. Not unlike the food bank where I volunteered in 2013, the recipients of these rations had no choice over what they received, and it was common to see rations for sale at the market as people tried to make money for other essentials.

Over the years, I’ve worked in many crises - conflict, drought, earthquakes, mass displacement - providing essential assistance to keep families afloat when their needs far outstripped local governments’ ability to respond. As time went on, my work on food insecurity evolved to delivering, and advocating for, cash assistance rather than physical food. In Northern Syria, I supported local organisations to scale up the use of cash which played a role in the complex cross-border humanitarian response from Turkey. In Uganda, I worked with mobile network companies to ensure mobile money would be available to South Sudanese refugees in temporary settlements with ad hoc informal markets. More recently, I worked remotely with colleagues on the Gaza crisis to plan cash assistance into their response, where despite aid blockades and closed borders, 400,000 households (over 2 million people) received at least one round of cash assistance, covering around 95% of Gaza’s population as of October 2025, including through funding from the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). WFP is now the largest provider of cash assistance with US$2.2 billion spent in 2023 and has removed ‘commodity vouchers’ from the specification.

Cash-first support is holistic. It recognises people as whole individuals rather than a set of siloed needs - food, water, clothing, housing, energy - all of which are interconnected. The evidence is overwhelming: as well as poverty and food security, cash has benefits across health, child protection, education, and has a powerful multiplier effect, stimulating local economies by turning every pound given to a household into as much as £2.50 in economic activity. In humanitarian contexts overseas, the UK Government has been a leading advocate for cash assistance instead of in-kind food aid. Through continually funding INGO’s efforts to evidence the impact of cash assistance in humanitarian settings, Britain has helped persuade other governments and UN bodies that, when properly implemented, cash transfers are the most effective form of crisis support. The UK Government funds the CALP Network, the go-to policy convener and training provider for humanitarian cash assistance, and has co-led the donor working group which jointly advocates for more cash where and when appropriate in humanitarian responses. In development settings, the UK strives to support countries to build their own cash-led social protection systems to reduce poverty and vulnerability, improve food consumption, and promote education, health and women’s empowerment.

The River Is Rising - at Home

But more and more people are falling into crisis. To return to Tutu’s analogy: the current is getting faster, the water deeper, and it’s becoming harder to throw out life rafts. And I’m no longer talking about the overseas contexts where I’ve spent much of my career. I’m talking about the UK.

The legacy of the Age of Austerity, initiated in 2010, has been well analysed and rightly criticised. By 2018, welfare spending had been cut by almost a quarter. Amid benefit caps, credit changes, and service closures, by 2025 child poverty has risen to 31% of all children in the UK - and nearly 50% among Black, Asian and minority ethnic households. A new deprivation index published in October 2025 looking at living conditions across ‘neighbourhoods’ - a geographical area of measurement with an average of approximately 1,500 residents or 650 households - found that 280 neighbourhoods had 90% of children living in deprivation. In 73 neighbourhoods, at least 99 per cent of children live in households classed as deprived.

Ironically, despite its advocacy for cash-first policies overseas, the UK Government’s domestic response to the austerity-driven economic crisis has leaned heavily on charitable food parcels. In 2010, the Trussell Trust operated 35 food banks. By 2013, when I volunteered in Hackney, that number had grown twentyfold to 650. In 2015, food banks could be found in areas that ordinarily would be considered wealthier areas of the UK. By 2019, the numbers had doubled again to 1,300. Meanwhile IFAN had identified 651 independent food banks operating outside of the Trussell Trust network, bringing the total to 2,024 food banks across the country. At this point, following campaigning, the government announced that it would introduce a measure for food insecurity in the UK.

Despite these extraordinary numbers, government research found that 84% of people experiencing very low food security did not use a food bank in 2023/24 implying wide misalignment between the populations’ needs and the response. This could be because food parcels rarely meet families’ dietary, cultural, or practical needs. Parents can’t always feed their children unfamiliar foods. Food banks report receiving rotten donations as businesses use them to dispose of waste. The system is unsustainable, undignified, and environmentally damaging.

Cash-first assistance delivers unique benefits. It allows households to meet multiple needs - food, energy, non-food consumable household items - while offering choice, dignity, and flexibility. It also acts as a bridge out of poverty, enabling people to potentially invest in training, equipment, or small businesses. You can’t invest a box of Kellogg’s, stale or not.

Leeds City Council together with the Trussell Trust conducted a pilot cash grant scheme in 2021. For some recipients, the cash grant offered long-term impacts around enabling them to build up savings and repay debt, and also improving their current financial situation. The outcomes of the pilot concluded that while grant recipients expected to need crisis support again, the majority would prefer receiving a cash grant over using a food bank in the future. Emotional wellbeing was improved for almost all recipients during the pilot period. As illustrated by a recipient of the Legendary Community Club cash pilot (only £36 per week for four weeks), the simplicity of being able to buy your child an ice-cream has clear psychological benefits, a release from the heavy burden of financial stress; I can almost see that mother standing straighter as the weight lifts from her shoulders.

Food banks do provide invaluable advice services in the wake of the advice being available elsewhere. In truth though, food banks should be the last resort. We should be able to ensure people find advice and support to maximise their incomes long before ending up at the doors of a food bank.

A Patchwork Safety Net

The Household Support Fund (HSF) has been one part of that safety net, designed to catch people before they hit rock bottom. Funding is provided to local authorities with discretion over how it’s used. A survey by the Local Government Association found that over three-quarters of surveyed councils used the HSF to provide in-kind hardship support such as food vouchers or white goods, almost two-thirds offered housing support or advice services and around 61 per cent provided cash-first crisis support.

While the HSF has also funded preventative measures such as third-sector grants (including food banks), warm spaces, and support for vulnerable groups, only two councils surveyed allocated the fund entirely to direct crisis support to households, choosing to use both in-kind and cash modalities.

Yet access has been inconsistent. The HSF funds 66% of Local Welfare Assistance, however 48 local authorities in England offered no Local Welfare Assistance in 2024/25, leaving 17.9 million people unable to access crisis support. The result has been described as a postcode lottery of crisis support.

Turning the Tide: From Crisis to Resilience

As my awareness of the food bank boom grew, I turned my attention from humanitarian assistance abroad to anti-poverty work at home. Encouragingly, networks like IFAN, Trussell and other anti-poverty campaigners have been advancing many of the same arguments I once made overseas: that real resilience begins with financial autonomy.

At the heart of their advocacy is a call for a national safety net that takes a cash-first approach to food insecurity - by increasing social security payments in line with the cost of living, and ensuring fair work and adequate wages. On the road to that goal, a cash-first crisis response at a local level is an essential step.

Labour promised in its manifesto to end mass dependence on food parcels. The scrapping of the two-child benefit cap in the Autumn Budget is a huge step in the right direction; a cash-first approach to reducing child poverty. On the horizon now shines a new opportunity to take another step on the ladder towards ending food parcel dependence. The Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF) will launch in April 2026, replacing the HSF with a reliable, multi-year £1 billion fund; stability that could enable councils to plan and allocate resources more effectively than before.

The “resilience” in its title must not be symbolic. The CRF can - and should - go a step further than the HSF by scaling up cash assistance. Clear, evidence-based guidance is essential to make this happen. The CRF’s framework should steer decision-makers towards cash-first approaches as the default, ensuring that flexibility works for recipients, as well as administrators. In-kind support will always have a place in the support system, for example provision of high value goods such as furniture and white goods where in-kind provides best value for money. In some instances remote or cost prohibitive shopping venues may lead people to prefer food parcels, while others with complex needs may also benefit best from vouchers or food parcels. But these cases are the minority. Cash provision alongside advice and support will maximise income for recipients, therefore enabling a holistic needs-driven, cash-first approach must be the priority.

Taking a cash-first approach isn’t unprecedented in the UK. Child benefit and the Scottish Child Payments are cash transfer programmes. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a temporary £20 uplift in Universal Credit created a 16% reduction in moderate to severe food insecurity in recipient households. 35 per cent of HSF crisis support was delivered through cash-first mechanisms. The CRF can and must go a step further. When delivered alongside advice and support, cash assistance can give people not just temporary crisis relief or prevention but the financial freedom to recover, rebuild and become resilient.

Cash assistance currently makes up around 20 per cent of humanitarian aid. In these contexts, the UK Government already recognises that - if funded effectively - humanitarian aid delivered in direct cash could increase to 50 percent, cutting out logistical challenges of delivering in-kind items, and supporting local economies by giving people the resources to purchase items on their local markets. The remaining 50 per cent includes costs of quality services such as health, education and protection which require specialist knowledge and key workers. It is recognised that cash delivered alongside these services generates the best outcomes for recipients. Cash is consistently cited by recipients as the single most important tool for meeting their essential needs and preventing further hardship. There is no reason why we can’t go beyond that ambition in the UK where markets and financial inclusion are strongly embedded in the cultural fabric.

To return once more to the river bank: people are falling into poverty not through individual failure, but because of a political, austerity-led economic crisis. In-kind crisis support cannot pull them out, it merely acts as a temporary floatation device. Until the UK builds a true cash-first safety net with adequate social security payments, fair wages and with clear financial advice services, we must use the tools we have boldly and compassionately: to aim higher, reach further, and restore to every person the respect and autonomy to make decisions for themselves. The question now is whether the Crisis and Resilience Fund can become the stronger upstream safety net at the local level we desperately need - one that prevents people from falling into the river and helps to build resilience so there’s no chance of being close to falling into crisis again.

Jennifer McAteer is a poverty and social security consultant dedicated to reducing household poverty in the UK and globally, committed to advancing equitable, people-centred social security systems through community engagement and scalable, locally informed solutions.

She has more than twelve years’ international experience shaping humanitarian cash assistance, food security, and social protection programmes across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Having worked extensively in conflict-affected and crisis settings, Jennifer brings a strong policy perspective to programme design, with particular expertise in linking cash and livelihood support to improved outcomes in child protection, education, and gender equality.

Her work centres on evidence-based approaches that strengthen household resilience while informing national and organisational policy frameworks. She is skilled at translating frontline insights into practical, actionable policy recommendations and supporting organisations to build stronger, more equitable crisis response programmes.