Recommendation 5

Ministers paused the national shielding programme in August and in September asserted that “we need to get away from the food parcel model”, without offering any evidence of the Government’s assessment of the level of disabled people’s needs for help accessing food, including free food deliveries. Since then, there have been local lockdowns and a return to national measures, with clinically extremely vulnerable people once again advised by the Government to avoid leaving their homes, including to shop for food. People must now rely on friends, family, carers, volunteers and local authorities, which have been provided with additional funding but whose resources are over-stretched. In circumstances in which the Government is asking people to shield, we believe it has a duty to ensure that the local support arrangements that have replaced the national shielding programme, and the funding in place to support them, are adequate to meet the level of need. The Government must immediately publish its assessment of disabled people’s needs for support accessing food, including provision of free food box deliveries. It must also publish a plan to review the adequacy of local arrangements and central government funding to support disabled people who need help getting food while coronavirus restrictions remain in place. We expect such a plan to be published within two months of publication of this Report, and be both updated and re-published regularly during the remainder of the pandemic.