THIS week the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) published a report that calls for the right to food for every citizen, every worker, every child across Britain.

In this report we wanted to give voice to our members. We wanted to hear from them their experiences and whether food workers were themselves feeling “food insecure” and suffering from food poverty.

The findings are shocking. Many of our members in the food industry — the forgotten key workers, the very people who kept us all fed during the pandemic — are struggling to feed themselves and their families. And the reason is simple: endemic low pay.

On the back of our report, Ian Lavery, Labour MP for Wansbeck, asked Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs George Eustice whether he thought in the arguably the sixth-richest country in the world that it was right that food workers were themselves struggling to eat.

The answer told us all we need to know about Tory callousness and how little they care about working people.

Empty and vacuous, he had no empathy or understanding about the reality on the ground for our members going out every single day to work during the pandemic to keep us fed, putting themselves in harm’s way when doing so and literally going hungry.

It showed clearly the need for our movement to unite and get back to some basics. We need to redouble our efforts and work together to tackle low-pay Britain — we need to campaign to ensure people are not going hungry.

As a union, we will work with everyone, right across our movement, to make this happen. We will fight in every single individual workplace to drive up pay, terms and conditions for our members.

But make no mistake — we will also fight in the political arena and campaign for a statutory minimum wage of at least £15 an hour.

This will ensure workers earn enough to give them dignity — the means to afford food and other essentials with some left over to enjoy precious time with friends and family. And we will fight for the right to food to being legislated.

The reality is that our economy has been deliberately structured in such a way that the conditions are ripe for hunger and food poverty. While the rich get richer, in-work poverty has been normalised as wages decline.

Welfare has been dismantled and what should be a system of social insurance has been replaced with a partial, cruel and punitive scheme that rewinds the clock to a bygone era based on the concept of the “deserving and undeserving poor.”

Imagine sanctioning the poorest and leaving without money to eat if they fail to turn up for an appointment on time.

It’s estimated that 14.5 million of our fellow citizens are in poverty when housing costs are factored in.

The environment and rural affairs committee at Westminster earlier this month reported how in the previous six months 7.6 million people, including 1.7 million children, had experienced food poverty.

How is this right and why are we allowing this to be normalised in 21st-century Britain?

These numbers are human beings — from our own members we hear from stories that expose the mental toll of working through the pandemic for low pay.

One Scottish food production worker told us: “I should have been shielding but my work refused to furlough me. I had no choice but to work because I couldn’t afford to be on statutory sick pay.”

Another food worker in Northern Ireland explained: “I get my basic wage, £8.72, and no bonus from my employer and was lucky to get a clap for key workers. There was very poor PPE for me and work colleagues.”

It took six staff members catching Covid-19 before anything was done.

A worker in England caught the mood of much of the responses succinctly: “The pay is terrible everywhere in these roles to be honest. It’s not enough to cover bills and food — it’s just not good enough.”

Our survey found that 20 per cent of respondents had needed food from friends or family to provide meals, while over 7 per cent of the food workers were having to use foodbanks.

Perhaps the most shocking finding was that almost one in five of the food workers in our survey told us that they had experienced running out of food because of a lack of money.

Moreover, double that figure told us that they had been worried about running out of food — which shows how the slightest change in the cost of living or number of hours worked could force so many more people into hunger.

Hearing these stories from our members has shown just how fractured our economy is.

We must never accept or normalise hunger, low pay and poverty. It is in direct contravention to our values. Legislating for a right to food should be at the heart of our movement going forward and getting behind the campaign led by Ian Byrne MP should be a priority.

A right to food will mean every single policy requires a food impact assessment. If done properly, this would mean a higher minimum wage and a welfare system that increases provision, ends the five-week wait for universal credit and puts the cruel sanctions regime into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

It means universal free school meals and it means a government-backed, community-focused approach to accessing food — not one reliant on charity.

When it comes down to it, people in our country are starving. We cannot accept the solution is to hope philanthropy fills the bellies of people who otherwise face going to bed hungry.

Let’s end hunger, end child poverty, in-work poverty and endemic low pay together. This is a battle that does take us back to basics — but sadly it must now be central in all the work that we do.

Sarah Woolley is general secretary of the BFAWU.