Talk:Hunger in the United Kingdom

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2019 and 6 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rachelbernstein. Peer reviewers: Tydobs, JBecker370, AnonaStudent.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:42, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality[edit]

This is not politically neutral. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.156.153.4 (talk) 13:27, 16 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, it seems that the lead provides no evidence that hunger was not a problem before austerity - the growth of food banks does not mean that there weren't hungry people before that. If no one can find some references showing that there has been a growth in hunger then I will rewrite the lead to reflect this Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 10:03, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Use of Toby Young blog in lede[edit]

Not sure how it's due weight to include a blog from Toby Young in the lede, setting such a low quality source against medical doctors, accademics, an All party MP groups, teachers, various charities active in this field etc.

Putting it another way, other than in the minds of partisan political commentators, Im not sure there's any credible argument against the fact that hunger in the UK is an increasing problem since 2010. To argue strongly against this, at least in the lede, seems to border on fringe POV pushing.

Granted, it would be equally wrong to blame the increase in hunger just on the Conservatives. As the older version of the lede said, the problem was caused in part by the rise in the price of food that became prominent back when labour was in power.

I agree certainly that hunger seems to be an increasing problem - food bank usage and malnutrition has undoubtedly massively increased in the past decade. The question is whether that is actually down to increased hunger or whether food banks are more widely known about/available and whether diagnosis of malnutrition has improved/stigma about having it has decreased, especially given that people are reporting a decrease in actual hunger. Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 10:16, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to be blunt, but people are not reporting a decrease in actual hunger.
What we have is an OECD source saying that between 2007/08 and 11/12 , the number of folk responding "yes" to the following questions fell from 9.8 > 8.1 "Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?"
Granted, someone without first class analytical skills might assume that is equivalent to "reporting a decrease in actual hunger".
Leaving aside margin for error considerations, here are the reasons that would be unsound:

1) We're using the indicator to support a conclusion that's somewhat (admitedly not exactly) opposite to that made by the OECD source itself, which opens by saying "...it is important to ensure that its costs do not disproportionately fall on the most vulnerable, including youth, whose inactivity and poverty rates have been rising since the onset of the crisis"

2) It's quite feasible that the stigma in admitting to having trouble buying food rose from 2008 to 2011, so we effectively had "shy" hungry people. From 2009 & especially 2010, there was an increase in poverty shaming, in negative media coverage on "benefits scroungers" etc. There have been several studies showing struggling people felt intense shame at not having the means to buy food for their children, in addition to the other forms of distress. If stigma in admiting to poverty has been rising, it would explain various contary indicators such as ONS figures that the cost of food has been rising as a porportion of the money available to low incomes earners. Not much point going into this in detail though, as I don't have any sources that prove the overall stigma rose.Some felt it did, but not impossible that overall there may have been less stigma in admitting to being unable to buy food by 2011.

3) A stronger point is that the survey wasn't targeted on the most vulnerable. Here in GB, unless you're in about the bottom 10%, not having money to buy food != going hungry. For the better off, it could mean having to shop at Morrisons instead of Waitrose. It could mean running out of money just for the last two days before a pay check (happens to some even in the top 10% by income) and then having to eat unappetising food from the cupboards, instead of buying what they fancy. Or it might mean buying cheap processed or starchy food while missing out on vegetables for a short while.

In a society with high inequality, it's possible, indeed it's common, for things to get better for the average person, while at the same time getting worse for those in the bottom 10%. So we can have an improvement for the top 90% (which corresponds only to an improvement in standard of living, not to a reduction of hunger as they weren't hungry in the first place.) And with regards to the OECD indicator, that improvement could swamp a deterioration for the bottom 10%,which does correspond to increased hunger.

Now let's look at some evidence that does focus on vulnerable people:

[In 2015] 6,367 children started reception class underweight - up 16% on 2012 figures
[In 2015] 7,663 children started their final year of primary school underweight - up 15% since 2012
Sources BBC summary of 2016 all party report or full 2016 report from the all party group of MPs

If you look at the full all party report, it gives a number of other indications of increasing hunger, apart from the increased food bank use, and increased deaths and cases of malnutrition. These includes a rise in anaemia, and direct (admittedly subjective, non quantitative) reports of hunger in schools.

Consider also that the all party source is from 2016, so even if the OECD source was correctly capturing a decrease in hunger, then it is outdated.

In light of all this, is it still your position that the OECD source and Toby Young blog belongs in the lede? FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:14, 30 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your very well thought out response. I will try to respond to your points in turn

1) It is indeed possible that hunger amongst young people has risen while decreasing elsewhere.

2) It is also possible that stigma has increased - although I think the opposite is true. Most people had never heard of a food bank a few years ago and because more people are using them then that would normally lead to a lower stigma surrounding them. As you say, we don't have any hard data on this so we can't really make a comment.

3) Also true, but looking at the data then only 8-10% of people are reporting not having enough money to buy food. It is possible that some people in that group thought that the question meant "Do you have enough money to buy the food you want/buy food at the shop you want", however I doubt that this proportion dropped significantly in the years that the survey took place.

Again only 8-10% of people responded positively to this question, which implies that it is focused on that bottom 10% of people, not the other 90%.

Your figures on underweight children are worrying, and I will add them to the article. However, given the very small proportion of children this affects, I would say it is possible this is also down to better diagnosis and schools being better at noticing the warning signs of malnutrition. Unfortunately we don't have any better data to say either way.

Personally I think it is possible that the rise in food bank usage is down to more awareness of them, but as we don't have any hard evidence either way then we should include both sides of the argument. Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 18:07, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the polite response, and good on you for not interpreting my bluntness as hostility.
Article content here on wikipedia should be a reflection of reliable sources, not our personal perception of arguments. Don't want to imply your intuition that food bank use is awareness driven is entirely false - there's always likely to be a few individuals who can afford to feed themselves, but still take advantage of foodbanks to have money for beer or whatever. However we have abundant hard evidence that for the most part it's genuine hardship that drives food bank use, not availability and awareness they are there. This has been shown by various studies using lagged logistic regression , linear regression and various other methods. here's a Oct 2016 Oxford University paper that references much of the recent work on this, and itself finds welfare sanctions as a primary cause on increased food bank use, in line with similar analyses released by ONS just a few days back. Btw, in Canada there's evidence that only about 1 in 3 hungry people use food banks, partly due to stigma associated with them, and there still aren't foodbanks serving every UK locality, so if anything foodbank use understates hunger in the UK.
While it's true we don't yet have the detailed data to fully quantify the increase in hunger, and so there is some argument about its severity , that fact that UK hunger has been increasing these last few years is no longer in dispute. That political argument did exist pior to May 2015, but not anymore.Even editor Toby Young would hopefully agree with this. In the run up to the 2015 General election, certain Labour MPs and other left wing commentators made exaggerated claims about hunger: "over 1 million now depending on foodbanks" etc, and a small number of conservative commentators made exaggerated claims in the other direction. Even back then, only the most fringe conservatives went as far as to deny that hunger was increasing - Cameron himself was always enthusiastic about food banks. The coalition announced universal (non means tested) free school meals for infants up to year 2 in 2013, which went into effect in 2014. As of 2016, Im not aware that even the most fringe Tories are denying UK hunger has been an increasing problem. On the left, some have accepted that excessive publicising of hunger can be counter productive even politically, as it can encourage some middle class swing voters to vote Tory out of fear of greater redistributive taxation. And Frank Fields has recently appealed to fellow Labour MPs to avoid the politicisation of hunger. So even from the conservative perspective, there's no partisan reason to deny hunger in the UK is a genuine problem. This is not to say there is no impact from the NPOV lede we currently have, misinformation on this issue contributes to reduced public support for efforts to address the problem.
Accordingly, including the OECD source & Toby young blog in the lede is objectionable for three reasons:
  • It's a blatant violation of Wikipedia policies including WP:NPOV and WP:MEDS.
  • It reduces support for resolving the problem hunger people in distress, some of whom are dying.
  • It represents embarrassingly poor scholarship and weighing of the available evidence.
I'd be interested if you can find a scholarly or at least analytically sound recent source that argues hunger in the UK is not an increasing problem, otherwise I think the encyclopaedic thing to do is to remove the OECD source and the Toby young blog from the lede. FeydHuxtable (talk) 14:55, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A blog is not a RS so that can be removed as a source immediately. It might be possible to word things to indicate that there is some disagreement without relying on unsupported blogs - for example we might say that many believe this is an increasing problem (with multiple RS cites) and some say that it is not (anything which meets RS saying that it isn't). What we certainly can't do is have an unsupported crazy-ass claim in the lede. JMWt (talk) 09:14, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this. It says in WP:RS that a blog "may be acceptable as sources if the writers are professional journalists or professionals in the field on which they write, and the blog is subject to the news outlet's full editorial control". But I'd certainly agree the blog doesn't warrant being in the lede. I'll go ahead and update the article with some of the information discussed above. I might re-organised the sections a little to make it easy for the reader to get an update the current issues for this topic. Also, quite a bit of information is duplicated from the food bank article, so may trim a little of that. FeydHuxtable (talk) 12:39, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Misuse of OCED source[edit]

It seems inaccurate to use this OECD source to reference us saying in the encyclopedia's voice that "There has been a decrease in hunger in the UK".

All the OECD source shows is that there was a fall from 9.8 > 8.1 between 2007/08 and 11/12 in the number of folk responding "yes" to a Gallup survey asking "Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?" . This admitedly suggests there might have been a decrease in hunger, but it's not a direct measure, and the conclusion is highly doubtful when it's set against the vast contrary evidence. FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:39, 27 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we could change it to "a decrease in reported hunger"? As above, food bank usage and malnutrition diagnoses are indirect measures of hunger - other factors can make these change even if actual hunger is constant. By the way, the next set of OECD figures should come out in 2017 so we will have a better comparison then. Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 10:19, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That would be better, but still a misuse per reasons listed in the section above. No objection in saying in the body there was an "indication of deacreased hunger" and indeed no objection to use of the Toby Young blog in the body of the article. FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:14, 30 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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