The Government has framed this week’s Budget around the idea of giving households breathing space today, while building hope for the future. There is much to welcome with measures that ease immediate financial pressures, including help with energy bills, action on everyday costs and increases to the National Living Wage.
But breathing space is, by its nature, temporary. While immediate relief is necessary, we cannot keep relying on short term interventions to compensate for longer term problems. The more important question is how we build an economy in which the essentials for a healthy life are genuinely affordable and accessible. Nowhere is that challenge clearer than in our food system.
The difference between cheaper food and affordable healthy diets
The Budget includes temporary tariff reductions on more than 100 food products, intended to ease costs for consumers. It is a welcome recognition that food prices matter, but there is an important distinction between making food cheaper and making healthy diets affordable.
The Food Foundation’s Broken Plate research reveals that healthier food costs almost twice as much per calorie as less healthy alternatives, with the gap widening. For families in the lowest income quintile, the Government recommended healthy diet would consume 85% of their disposable income. These figures point to something much more fundamental than a temporary rise in grocery prices.
If we want people to eat well, we need to think about the relationship between household incomes, the relative price of different foods, and the food environments in which people make their choices. That means considering what we incentivise through tax and trade policy. It means asking whether wages and benefits are sufficient to meet the real cost of a healthy life. And it means ensuring that the places where people live have accessible, affordable sources of nutritious food. None of these things can be addressed in isolation.
Prevention starts with the food we eat
There is another dimension to this debate that deserves much more attention. We often discuss food affordability as a cost-of-living issue, while treating rising rates of food-related ill health as a separate challenge for our health service. Yet the two are intrinsically connected.
When people cannot afford the food that supports good health, the consequences don’t stop at the supermarket checkout. Poor nutrition contributes to worsening health, greater inequalities and increased demand on public services.
The Government rightly recognises the importance of prevention in healthcare. But prevention cannot be confined to what happens within the NHS. It must also concern the everyday conditions that shape people’s health long before they require treatment. That includes access to nutritious food.
The economic argument matters too. Investing in healthy food access is not simply about increasing household spending power. Done well, it can also strengthen local food businesses, support more resilient local economies and help reduce the long-term costs of preventable ill health. We should be thinking about these benefits together, rather than dividing them between separate discussions about welfare, food policy, economic growth and healthcare.
We already have solutions that work
Healthy Start offers a good example of what a more joined-up approach could look like. The scheme provides targeted financial support for pregnant women and families with young children to buy nutritious food. It is an established mechanism through which investment can directly improve access to healthy diets during a particularly important period of life.
Yet its eligibility rules mean that many families who need this support cannot access it. New research from the Food Foundation estimates that 750,000 pregnant women and young children in low-income households are missing out. At the same time, England has taken the welcome step of extending Free School Meals to children in all households receiving Universal Credit. This raises an important question. If we recognise the value of supporting children’s nutrition once they reach school, why are we not taking the same approach during pregnancy and the earliest years of life?
Alexandra Rose is supporting the Food Foundation’s call to expand Healthy Start to all pregnant women and children under five in families receiving Universal Credit. This would be a step towards a more consistent system of nutritional support, building on an established national programme rather than creating another short-term intervention. And it is an investment with potential benefits extending far beyond the immediate cost of a family’s food shop. The Food Foundation estimates that expanding eligibility could generate £2.36 in wider benefits for every £1 invested over ten years.
Healthy Start alone will not solve food insecurity, of course. But it demonstrates what becomes possible when we start treating access to good nutrition as part of the infrastructure of a healthy society, rather than simply a matter of individual purchasing power.
From short-term relief to lasting change
One of the more interesting aspects of this Budget is the distinction the Government itself draws between temporary financial relief and longer-term structural reform, particularly in relation to energy. We need to bring that same ambition to food.
That means looking beyond individual interventions and asking how government policy, public investment, local economies and the food system can work together to make healthy diets affordable and accessible to more people. It means recognising that food policy is also health policy, economic policy and social policy. And it means being willing to measure success differently.
Of course households need breathing space when prices rise and incomes are stretched. There will always be times when immediate support is necessary. But the long-term ambition must be to reduce the underlying pressures, not become better at responding to them.
The measure of success should not just be how much pressure we can temporarily relieve, but how much of that pressure we can permanently remove. If we are serious about building a healthier, more resilient society, ensuring everyone can afford and access nutritious food needs to become part of how we design our systems, not an afterthought when those systems fail.