Feed, BPAS and others write to leading food provision charities

Together with BPAS, two leading third sector organisations and eighteen independent foodbanks, we wrote to the CEO’s of the Trussell Trust, Fareshare, Little Village, Independant Food Aid Network and The Felix Project asking them to review their formula provision policies, and offering our support with such.

Little Village responded

We’ve reviewed your guidance and have updated our own formula guidance accordingly so that on the occasions we do receive donations of formula on site, the team are aware of your guidelines.

Fareshare responded

I will give my commitment to revisit the restrictions and current policy for this product with our Primary Authority early in the New Year

We are currently working with the Felix Project on their policy review.

To date, the Trussell Trust has not responded.

The text of our letter read:

Dear [name] CEO,

We are writing to you as healthcare professionals and charities – including food banks which currently distribute infant food to those in need – regarding access to infant formula for babies living in food poverty in the UK.

We appreciate that you are completely committed to doing all that you can to support families during what will be an incredibly difficult winter, and that amending or adapting existing policies can be challenging for large organisations. We are therefore contacting you to offer clarity around the law regarding the provision of first infant formula at food banks, and to offer our support and guidance, particularly from those co-signatories who already have safe infant food redistribution policies in place at their food and baby banks. We hope that by sharing our experience and research with you, that your organisation will be able to adopt pathways which facilitate the redistribution of this vital, and incredibly expensive, food source.

We are not suggesting that your organisation accepts donations from formula manufacturers, but that pathways are implemented to enable the redistribution of formula that is donated by individuals and via supermarkets. We do not view foodbanks as the long-term solution to food insecurity for babies and their families. Improving access to breastfeeding support and challenging the exploitative practices within the infant formula industry are vital to securing food security for infants and families in the long term, but action is needed now as families face an incredibly difficult winter.

The current policies were implemented with no doubt the best of intentions. However, the inability of families to access infant formula at food banks is harming the health and wellbeing of babies and parents in poverty. Reports in the media this month highlighted that there is a very real risk that increasing numbers of infants will be hospitalised suffering from malnutrition and severe illness due to the soaring cost of infant formula. An inquiry, published earlier this year by the charity Feed, contains heartbreaking testimony from both service providers and service users. One baby bank worker described parents resorting to unsafe feeding practices, including “watering down milk to make it last longer” and in other cases “parents simply not eating in order to buy their baby a tin of formula milk.”

National AIDS Trust has highlighted particular issues with access to formula milk for mothers living with HIV. Though breastfeeding can be supported by clinicians in certain circumstances, national guidelines in the UK recommend that women living with HIV formula feed, particularly for the first six months, to remove any risk of HIV transmission. However, many struggle to afford formula milk and there is no consistent provision through the NHS or other local services to support access. This is forcing some women to go hungry in order to afford formula for their infant – compromising their own health and potentially compromising the effectiveness of their HIV treatment. There are many factors that influence the choice between breast and formula feeding for people living with HIV and affordability and access should not be one of them.

Whilst support schemes such as Healthy Start and Best Start are available to some families, like other benefit schemes available these are means tested and eligibility is restricted. Furthermore, these voucher schemes do not cover the cost of formula feeding an infant. Thus, while we work towards broader, long-term solutions for families experiencing food poverty, there is an urgent need to maximise routes of immediate formula provision for families with formula fed infants.

It is important to note that there are food and baby banks in the UK which currently distribute infant formula and infant foods, including a number of co-signatories to this letter, demonstrating that there are no legal or clinical barriers to your organisations doing the same. We would be pleased to meet with you to discuss the service we provide and how we ensure that we are safely and effectively meeting the needs of families with infants within our communities.

We have attached a guide to distribution of infant formula at food banks, which has been developed by Feed and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, BPAS, and an explanation of the legal framework surrounding the provision of infant formula.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Erin Williams, Feed, erin@feeduk.org, on behalf of:

Dr. Rosie McNee, Feed

Clare Murphy, British Pregnancy Advisory Service, BPAS

and [redacted]